The Ache to Interpret

## Citation

Bagocius, Ben. "The Ache to Interpret: Literature, Science, and Seeing Again." *On Being*, 13 Feb. 2016, https://onbeing.org/blog/the-ache-to-interpret-literature-science-and-seeing-again/, accessed 25 September 2017.

## Summary

Bagocius begins by describing an iterative experience with STEM students in class, receiving their first essay back and shrugging off a poor grade with "I'm a math student," or similar expressions that distance themselves from the analytical and interpretive work that the course requires. Bagocius reads Darwin and Einstein as figures who recognized the importance of language and interpretatio, writing:

> Both scientists ceaselessly changed their interpretations of cells and fossils, of bending light and dark matter — subjects they studied deeply and loved so much until their dying days. They ached to express the invisible, the unseen, the poetry of the forces that shape our everyday lives, whether they be extinct species whose disappearance molded our present forms or quantum mechanics whose concealed churnings have shaped the roundings and points of our limbs. These scientists communicated their expertise through the craft of writing and the labor of rethinking, the patience of observation and the revision of interpretation, not unlike the skills business majors and scientists learn in my classes.
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Describing a classroom exercise that asks students to list the most influential scientific discoveries and what made them so enduring - students come to the consensus that the revolutionary quality of these discoveries is what made them so profound, that they disrupted knowledge that was previously taken for granted. "This activity helps students who don’t consider themselves writers realize that scientists do not tap into a robotic or a rote mode that is the antithesis of subjectivity and interpretation."

Per Nietzsche, what philosophers and scientists hold in common is that they view truth as illusory, something to be seen beyond rather than accepted. "Interpretation, in other words, is not only for humanists. Interpretation is for all humans - engineers and neurobiologists included." Interpretation makes our lives wider, deeper, different, better. It stimulates us to evolve in a different spacetime, where iridescence and darkness bend differently around us. And we bend differently."

"Each field must leave its corner and come to the center with its contributions. My classroom transforms from an arena of defense to a space of communion. [...] After a semester in my course, the scientists do not become English majors. most students continue to pursue the discipline with which they entered. And thank goodness. We need engineers who see themselves as artists in kind, if not in degree, with literary types. [...] Likewise, the artists in my class come to see themselves as engineers who paint or photograph a calculus of geometrical shapes..."

## Notes

What a wonderful piece by an Indiana University alum, describing the experience of teaching a course like W131! This drive to connect the disciplines resonates strongly with my own interests to find confluence in my students' work and what (and how) Rhetoric asks them to think and do. I particularly love Bagocius's emphasis on the classroom and education - what he is describing is training in becoming human, but the particular character of human might be Lanham's *homo rhetoricus*.

Questions - When Bagocius talks about interpretation, is this simply a stand-in for the use of language to communicate and make sense of the world? That is, everything is interpretation. The difference between what is being described here vs. in something like the hermeneutics of suspicion, I think, is that Bagocius is talking about interpretation without a subsequent search for intention?