Science & Tech Quote by Rudolf Arnheim

Order is doing double duty here: it’s a description of nature and a quiet dare to the human ego. Arnheim, an artist who treated perception as something structured rather than mystical, leans on the aura of "modern science" to legitimize a sensibility artists already practice instinctively: the world isn’t a chaos we impose meaning onto, it’s a field of forces already leaning toward pattern. By pairing "organic and inorganic", he flattens the old hierarchy that reserves purposiveness for living things. Rocks, bodies, weather, cities: all of it is a choreography of tendencies.

The intent is less to preach determinism than to reposition creativity. If nature "strives towards a state of order", then making art isn’t a heroic act of invention from nothing; it’s closer to alignment, to finding the latent structure and amplifying it. That’s why the second clause matters: "man's actions are governed by the same tendency". Arnheim is smuggling ethics and aesthetics into the same room. Composition, social behavior, scientific inquiry, even everyday problem-solving become variations on a single drive: reducing noise, stabilizing form, making things cohere.

The subtext is a rebuke to modernity’s favorite self-image: the liberated individual improvising against an indifferent universe. Arnheim suggests the opposite. Our freedom operates inside constraints that feel less like chains and more like gravity. In the context of 20th-century upheaval - avant-garde fragmentation, world wars, the rise of systems thinking - he offers a counter-myth: not "everything falls apart", but "everything searches for shape", and art is one of the places we can watch that search become visible.