"When a system is considered in two different states, the difference in volume or in any other property, between the two states, depends solely upon those states themselves and not upon the manner in which the system may pass from one state to the other"
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A funny thing about this line is how impersonally it asserts a kind of moral law: outcomes over narratives, states over stories. Arnheim - better known for arguing that perception has its own intelligence - borrows the cool, airtight diction of thermodynamics to make a point that lands well beyond physics. If you compare two conditions of a system, he says, the delta is real whether the journey was elegant, violent, improvised, or accidental. The numbers don’t care about your mythology.
That’s the intent: to smuggle an aesthetic and psychological argument into the authority of scientific language. In art-making, we obsess over process (the brushstroke, the ritual, the suffering-for-the-work). Arnheim’s subtext is almost bracingly anti-romantic: what finally matters is the configuration you arrive at and the measurable relations within it. The path can be inspiring, but it doesn’t rewrite the structural fact of the result. It’s a corrective to the cult of “how it was made,” and a defense of form as something more than a byproduct of biography.
Contextually, it fits Arnheim’s larger project in mid-century visual theory: pushing back against the idea that perception is passive or purely subjective. By describing change as path-independent, he hints that artworks and experiences have internal logic - constraints, balances, tensions - that can be analyzed without collapsing into personal anecdote. Read culturally, it’s also a quiet jab at modern life’s obsession with “the journey.” Sometimes the end state really does tell you what happened, no matter how pretty the story sounded along the way.
That’s the intent: to smuggle an aesthetic and psychological argument into the authority of scientific language. In art-making, we obsess over process (the brushstroke, the ritual, the suffering-for-the-work). Arnheim’s subtext is almost bracingly anti-romantic: what finally matters is the configuration you arrive at and the measurable relations within it. The path can be inspiring, but it doesn’t rewrite the structural fact of the result. It’s a corrective to the cult of “how it was made,” and a defense of form as something more than a byproduct of biography.
Contextually, it fits Arnheim’s larger project in mid-century visual theory: pushing back against the idea that perception is passive or purely subjective. By describing change as path-independent, he hints that artworks and experiences have internal logic - constraints, balances, tensions - that can be analyzed without collapsing into personal anecdote. Read culturally, it’s also a quiet jab at modern life’s obsession with “the journey.” Sometimes the end state really does tell you what happened, no matter how pretty the story sounded along the way.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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