Pathway: Life as Art, Science, and History (review)

A professional historian, painter, and successful breeder of purebred cattle, Margaret Derry comes across in the present book as somewhat of a Renaissance figure. Her topic is art, science and history and the relationships that exist among them. She approaches all three from historical and philosophical perspectives. The number of issues evoked and positions taken in the book make it a difficult one to review. To say that, however, is in no way to deny its considerable interest.

The title and the subtitle both suggest the deeply personal nature of the work. A form of intellectual autobiography, it tells the story of 'a long mental journey,' of a 'pathway' of self-discovery that Derry set out on shortly after the death of her mother in 1982. She believes that the insights about herself to which she has come reveal fundamental truths about human life in general.

The story begins with her attempt to deal with grief by remembering her mother and places associated with their shared life. This leads to a sense of the importance of memory for life in general and in a special way for art. A key word is 'nostalgia,' defined here as 'that form of memory which perceives aspects of the past with an appreciation of beauty and love in the present.'

The book follows a somewhat chronological order with each chapter representing a new stage in her journey. The role of memory in aesthetical thinking and the making of art leads to a consideration of the relation between art and science. Early memories of a child's fascination with dinosaurs and of visits to the Royal Ontario Museum lead her to undertake a series of paintings of dinosaur remains and to research recent scientific theories about them. This stimulates her to try to understand the relation between the kind of thinking involved in art and science.

Derry's natural bent is a philosophical, even an epistemological one. Seeking to clarify her experience, she turns to a range of philosophers including Kant, the German Idealists, and other Germans such as Nietzsche and Heidegger.

In 1990 Derry returned to the University of Toronto to work on a PhD in history. Her thesis was on beef cattle farming in Ontario, 1870–1924. Its completion brought about a renewed interest in thinking about art and science but now in relation to history. It becomes for her the key to the relation between the other two.

The chapter dealing with historiography is, not surprisingly, the most sophisticated part of the book. This is an area in which she is most at home from a scholarly point of view. Her sympathies here are with those who refuse to see history in purely scientific terms. It must be both quantitative and qualitative; it must involve both scientific and artistic approaches.

Derry's focus on the story of her own involvement with memory, art, science, and history gives her account an existential quality. She is driven to understand how these various disciplines come together in the individual living, thinking person. The word 'holistic' comes back a number of times and seems to evoke the ideal she is seeking.

'Truth, beauty, love or lack of concealment,' she says, 'are all one and understanding their meaning defines our humanity.' It is perhaps symptomatic of her final stance that the last chapter contains a quotation from Augustine's Confessions and ends with one from the Symposium of Plato. Those trained in love and beauty will 'catch sight of something of "unbelievable beauty"' and come to 'appreciate the timelessness of things that are eternal.'

Whether one agrees with all of Derry's more theoretical affirmations, the story she tells is a fascinating one. It is about ideas and about one highly intelligent and sensitive person's search for understanding herself and her involvement in art, science, and history. The book invites the reader to embark on a similar journey.