Heraclitus and Ehrenzweig

When Heraclitus proposed his ideas about logos  (an ordering or design component felt throughout life and the universe) he said many men knew it but forgot it in moments. Ehrenzweig understood something of logos except he called it the processes of the unconscious. The deepest layers of creativity arose he said from the chaos of undifferentiation. This was not so different from the threat of disintegration and chaos tied to psychoses but in the artists case, ego strength and faith in just such processes reaped a rich reward in terms of creativity.

Ehrenzweig goes on to suggest creativity requires a form of diffused attention required by the mind to  grasp visions and structures lying in  the unconscious. This is the artists raw material. This free floating attention is not dissimilar to mystical states states, oneness, or oceanic feelings, as described by Freud. What might drive some mad is therefore transformed by the power of the creative mind into articulate images grasped by consciousness and worked through editing, developing, reviewing and contemplating.

The vague primary unconscious structures then take shape according to the artists life skills experiences and education. Intuition, dreams, imagination, take such structures-symbols and make them into art. If Heraclitus is right Ehrenzweig is too and states we apprehend such universal patterns and structures rich in meaning. In a sense art is simply the immanent vision of ideas held transcendentally within the logos. If all creation, including the human mind, holds to these principles, as indeed the German idealists stated, culture is enriched by works seen to run deeper in layers of meaning as their surface images suggest.