(Another pass at my design vs engineering concept. It remains un-nailed. It’s important, though, so I will continue to spiraling into the gravitational center of this perspective until I find the standpoint from which it is best said.)

Social engineering failed and will always fail, not because it is hubristic for humanity to try to shape and regulate its own existence, but because it conceives of society in engineering terms — as an engine, functioning mechanically, with well-understood technical requirements.

Social design, however, could very well succeed, at least in certain contexts. Design pays attention to more than function and form. It pays attention to what happens when systems are partially composed of free-willed beings who should not be compelled to behave  mechanically.

In order for social engineering to work, human beings must be compelled to behave mechanically — that is, forced to comply with roles and adhere to rules — that allow the system to function efficiently and predictably, like a well-oiled machine.

*

I am coming to believe the word “design” is most useful as an antithesis to “engineering” — an antithesis defined within the broad category of  “intentional efforts to make changes to the world”.

Sometimes I worry that graduate school is a form of aversion therapy cure students of all enthusiasm for a subject of study.

Other times I think graduate school is a test of a person’s passion for a subject of study. It is less a process of mastering the subject itself than a way to discover once and for all whether one has the love and will required to eventually master it.

This last story shows that the people of Ombrosa, who before had been teeming with gossip about my brother’s love life, now, faced with this passion exploding as it were above their heads, maintained a dignified reserve, as if toward something bigger than themselves. Not that they did not criticize the Marchesa’s conduct; but more for its exterior aspects, such as that breakneck galloping of hers (“Where can she be going, at such a pace?”) and that continual hoisting of furniture on to treetops. There was already an air among them of considering it all just as one of the nobles’ ways, one of their many idiosyncrasies. (“All up trees, nowadays; women, men. What’ll they think of next?”) In fact, times were coming that were to be more tolerant, but also more hypocritical.

Continue reading From Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees →

Applied natural science is engineering.

Applied worldview is poetry.

Applied social science is design.

Excerpt from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy

I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English
yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England
under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.
I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to
write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes
of philosophical illustration.  There will probably be a general
impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking
by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which
turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool.
I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool.  But if you
imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly
was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied
with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero
of this tale.  His mistake was really a most enviable mistake;
and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for.

…But I have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in
a yacht, who discovered England.  For I am that man in a yacht.
I discovered England. … When I fancied that I stood alone I was really
in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom.
It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original;
but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy
of the existing traditions of civilized religion.  The man from
the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was
the first to find Europe.  I did try to found a heresy of my own;
and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it
was orthodoxy.

“The Dream of Coleridge”

The lyrical fragment “Kubla Khan” (fifty-odd rhymed and irregular verses of exquisite prosody) was dreamed by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge on a summer day in 1797. Coleridge writes that he had retired to a farm near Exmoor; an indisposition obliged him to take a sedative; sleep overcame him a few moments after he had read a passage from Purchas describing the construction of a palace by Kubla Khan, the emperor who was made famous in the West by Marco Polo. In the dream the lines that had been read casually germinated and grew; the sleeping man perceived by intuition a series of visual images and, simultaneously, the words that expressed them. After a few hours he awoke with the certainty that he had composed, or received, a poem of about three hundred verses. He remembered them with singular clarity and was able to write down the fragment that is now part of his work. An unexpected visitor interrupted him and afterward he was unable to remember any more. To his no small surprise and mortification, although he still retained “some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!” Coleridge wrote.

Swinburne felt that what he had been able to salvage was the supreme example of music in the English language, and that to try to analyse it would be like trying to unravel a rainbow (the metaphor belongs to John Keats). Summaries or descriptions of poetry whose principal virtue is music are useless and would only defeat our purpose; so then let us merely remember that Coleridge was given a page of undisputed splendor in a dream.

Although the case is quite extraordinary, it is not unique. In the psychological study The World of Dreams Havelock Ellis has compared it to the case of the violinist and composer, Giuseppe Tartini, who dreamed that the Devil (his slave) was playing a prodigious sonata on the violin; when the dreamer awoke he played Tritio del Diavolo from memory. Another classic example of unconscious cerebration is that of Robert Louis Stevenson; as he himself has related in his “Chapter on Dreams,” one dream gave him the plot of Olalla and another, in 1884, the plot of Jekyll and Hyde. Tartini undertook to imitate the music he had heard in a dream. Stevenson received outlines of plots from his dreams. More akin to Coleridge’s verbal inspiration is the inspiration attributed by the Venerable Bede to Caedmon {Historia ecclesiastica genlis Anglorum, IV, 24}. The case occurred at the end of the seventh century in the missionary and warring England of the Saxon kingdoms. Caedmon was an uneducated herdsman and was no longer young; one night he slipped away from a festive gathering because he knew that they would pass the harp to him and he knew also that he could not sing. He fell asleep in the stable near the horses, and in a dream someone called him by name and told him to sing. Caedmon replied that he did not know how to sing, but the voice said, “Sing about the origin of created things.” Then Caedmon recited verses he had never heard before. He did not forget them when he awoke, and was able to repeat them to the monks at the nearby monastery of Hild. Although he did not know how to read, the monks explained passages of sacred history to him and he ruminated on them like a clean animal and converted them into delightful verses. He sang about the creation of the world and man and the story of Genesis; the Exodus of the children of Israel and their entrance into the Promised Land; the Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of the Lord; the coming of the Holy Spirit; the teaching of the Apostles; and also the terror of the Last Judgment, the horror of Infernal Punishments, the delights of Heaven, and the graces and punishments of God. He was the first sacred poet of the English nation. Bede wrote that no one equaled him because be did not learn from men, but from God. Years later he foretold the hour of his death and awaited it in sleep. Let us hope that he met his angel again.

At first glance the dream of Coleridge may appear to be less astonishing than his precursor’s. “Kubla Khan” is an admirable composition, and the principal merit of the nine-line hymn dreamed by Caedmon is that its origin was in a dream; but Coleridge was already a poet while Caedmon’s vocation was revealed to him. Nevertheless, a later event makes the marvel of the dream in which “Kubla Khan” was engendered even more mysterious. If it is true, the story of Coleridge’s dream began many centuries before Coleridge and has not yet ended.

The poet’s dream occurred in 1797 (some say 1798), and he published his account of the dream in 1816 as a gloss or a justification of the unfinished poem. Twenty years later the first western version of one of those universal histories that are so abundant in Persian literature appeared in Paris, in fragmentary form—the General History of the World by Rashid al-Din, which dates from the fourteenth century. One line reads as follows; “East of Shang-tu, Kubla Khan built a palace according to a plan that he had seen in a dream and retained in his memory.” Rashid al-Din was the Vizir of Ghazan Mahmud, a descendant of Kubla.

A thirteenth-century Mongolian emperor dreams a palace and then builds it according to his dream; an eighteenth-century English poet (who could not have known that the structure was derived from a dream) dreams a poem about the palace. In comparison with this symmetry, which operates on the souls of sleeping men and spans continents and centuries, the levitations, resurrections, and apparitions in the sacred books are not so extraordinary.

But how shall we explain it? Those who automatically reject the supernatural (I try, always, to belong to this group) will claim that the story of the two dreams is merely a coincidence, a chance delineation, like the outlines of lions or horses we sometimes see in clouds. Others will argue that the poet somehow found out that the Emperor had dreamed the palace, and then said he had dreamed the poem in order to create a splendid fiction that would also palliate or justify the truncated and rhapsodic quality of the verses. {At the beginning of the nineteenth century or at the end of the eighteenth, judged by readers of classical taste, “Kubla Khan” was much more outrageous than it is now. In 1881 Coleridge’s Erst biographer, Traill, could still write: “The extravagant dream poem ‘Kubla Khan’ is little more than a psychological curiosity.”} That conjecture seems reasonable, but it obliges us to postulate, arbitrarily, a text not identified by Sinologists in which Coleridge was able to read, before 1816, about Kubla’s dream. {See John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (1927), pp. 358, 585.} Hypotheses that transcend reason are more appealing. One such theory is that the Emperor’s soul penetrated Coleridge’s, enabling Coleridge to rebuild the destroyed palace in words that would be more lasting than marble and metal.

The first dream added a palace to reality; the second, which occurred five centuries later, a poem (or the beginning of a poem) suggested by the palace. The similarity of the dreams reveals a plan; the enormous length of time involved reveals a superhuman performer. To inquire the purpose of that immemorial or long-lived being would perhaps be as foolhardy as futile, but it seems likely that he has not yet achieved it. In 1691 Father Gerbillon of the Society of Jesus confirmed that ruins were all that was left of the palace of Kubla Khan; we know that scarcely fifty lines of the poem were salvaged. Those facts give rise to the conjecture that the series of dreams and labors has not yet ended. The first dreamer was given the vision of the palace and he built it; the second, who did not know of the other’s dream, was given the poem about the palace. If the plan does not fail, some reader of “Kubla Khan” will dream, on a night centuries removed from us, of marble or of music. This man will not know that two others also dreamed. Perhaps the series of dreams has no end, or perhaps the last one who dreams will have the key.

After writing all this, I perceive—or think that I perceive—another explanation. Perhaps an archetype not yet revealed to men, an eternal object (to use Whitehead’s term), is gradually entering the world; its first manifestation was the palace; its second was the poem. Whoever compared them would have seen that they were essentially the same.

– Jorge Luis Borges

I am not exactly enjoying the first chapter of Levinas’s Otherwise Than Being, but I am finding it valuable.

Levinas’s use of the word “exception” is fascinating, and I think I am going to adopt it for my own work.

One thing I believe he is saying: we tend to make category mistakes when attempting to understand metaphysics, conceiving what must be exceived.

Positive metaphysics are objectionable, in the most literal possible way, when it tries to conceptualize what can only be exceptualized, to objectify that to which we are subject, to comprehend what comprehends — in order to achieve certainty about what is radically surprising.

In my own religious vision, this category mistake, made tacitly at the practical and moral level, and only then, as a consequence, at the explicit and conscious level is the Edenic Fall. Human nature is less perverse than it is everse.

Our innate incapacity to stop incessantly committing this mistake is why we must incessantly repent.

It is this belief that makes me answer “Judeo-Christian” when asked my religious orientation. Mine is a metaphysic of infinite shock.

*

A garden is an everted fruit, and a fruit, an everted garden.

The nacre inner lining of a shell is an everted pearl, and a pearl, an everted nacre lining.

The exception is the everted conception, and the conception, the everted exception.

Did Levinas write anything that wasn’t a rebuke to Heidegger?

Levinas : Heidegger :: Nietzsche : Wagner

Is it just me, or do the conceptions of logocentrism outlined in my Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory seem logocentric?

Logocentrism – The Greek logos has a wide range of meanings, and designates both a rational or intelligible principle and a structure or order that provides phenomena with an origin, or that explains their nature. Hence the common use of the suffix ‘ology’ to designate a branch of study or knowledge, as in ‘psychology’, literally meaning ‘the study of the soul’. The related verb legein means ‘say’, ‘tell’ or ‘count’. Aristotle uses logos to mean the rational principle or element of the soul, as opposed to the irrational principle of DESIRE (Nicomachean Ethics I.13). In Christian theology, the logos becomes the Word that was with God and that was made flesh when it was incarnated in Christ. The opening verse of the fourth Gospel provides the most sublime example of logocentrism: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John ii.1).

The critique of logocentrism is a central feature of DERRIDA’s DECONSTRUCTION. According to Derrida (1967a), Western philosophy from Plato onwards has always been logocentric in that it makes speech, or the logos, the origin and site of truth, and privileges the phonic aspect of language at the expense of the graphic aspect of WRITING. Speech, that is, is assumed to be the spontaneous and complete means of expression available to a SUBJECT who is self-present in the sense of being self-transparent, self-conscious and self-sufficiently rational. Logocentrism assumes that spoken language is an adequate expression of preexisting ideas and that writing is merely a secondary or even parasitic SUPPLEMENT to speech. The Saussurean theology of the SIGN (see also SAUSSURE) is a classic instance of logocentrism which locates meaning in the perfect coincidence between a sound (signifier) and an idea or image (signified). Ultimately, such a theory is a return to the biblical thesis that ‘In the beginning was the Word’, and it implies the existence of a primal or transcendental signifier which is the origin of all meaning. According to Derrida, logocentrism, and the related PHONOCENTRISM, is a form of ETHNOCENTRISM, or even the original and most powerful form of ethnocentrism, because it privileges westem phonetic alphabets over all other forms of writing and makes Western reason (logos) the sole criterion for knowledge.

This seems to me to the words of men privileged to dedicate themselves to lives of letters and discourse, and thereby sentencing themselves to lives of letters and discourse about letters and discourse with others who live similar lives.

Or maybe I am just trying to find privilege in my bondage to everyday practical concern.

In my life — a designerly life — reason, language, and argumentation result not in publications and citations, but rather in the shape a medical device will take, the arrangement of elements on a screen, or rooms in a building, how a database is structured, how business will be conducted, the stories people will tell one another or unconsciously perform, whether each of us is able to do work in a way that makes sense to us or if some of us are forced to proceed in a way that is unnatural and awkward, whether time or money runs out, and a project fails (or more often, embezzles resources from private lives).

In my designerly life logic matters some of the time and not that much. More than anything, it is the confident tone of sound logic, the essence of truthiness in truth, that lends force to logic. Arguments are decided by other forces — money, charisma, will, determination, composure.

Philosophically what matters most is the phronetic grokking of some semi-alien form of life and working through its implications, not with written ethnographic reports but with concrete artifacts that will change lives of those who accept them into their lives. This line of thought always leads me to a beautiful passage from Clifford Gerrtz, which I like to extend:

From Clifford Geertz’s “From the Native’s Point of View”:

“…Accounts of other peoples’ subjectivities can be built up without recourse to pretensions to more-than-normal capacities for ego effacement and fellow feeling. Normal capacities in these respects are, of course, essential, as is their cultivation, if we expect people to tolerate our intrusions into their lives at all and accept us as persons worth talking to. I am certainly not arguing for insensitivity here, and hope I have not demonstrated it. But whatever accurate or half-accurate sense one gets of what one’s informants are, as the phrase goes, really like does not come from the experience of that acceptance as such, which is part of one’s own biography, not of theirs. It comes from the ability to construe their modes of expression, what I would call their symbol systems, which such an acceptance allows one to work toward developing. Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem — than it is like achieving communion.”

[To which I add: “Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem…” or knowing how to design for them. A design that makes sense, which is easy to interact with and which is a valuable and welcome addition to a person’s life is proof that this person is understood, that the designer cared enough to develop an understanding and to apply that understanding to that person’s benefit.]

“Truly” is threefold.

Truly means a truth is really, actually and genuinely true.

• Really true: accords with the what of reality.
• Actually true: accords with the how of action.
• Genuinely true: accords with why of a world that ought to exist.

* * *

I have also considered “authentic” as an alternative to “genuine” but genus evokes my intended meaning better than autos, especially in light of this pretty etymological entry from my dictionary:

1596, from L. genuinus “native, natural,” from root of gignere “beget” (see genus), perhaps infl. in form by contrasting adulterinus “spurious.” Alternative etymology is from L. genu “knee,” from an ancient custom of a father acknowledging paternity of a newborn by placing it on his knee.

A language game is part of a lifeworld, and a lifeworld is a rite understood through participation.

If one extracts the linguistic component of a rite and participates solely in that aspect, one may partially understand, or totally understand — which is indistinguishable from totally misunderstanding, unless one trusts the indignation of the misunderstood.

*

A digression:

Ideologues know better. Indignation is denial of truth.

Seeing indignation this way is the cornerstone of ideology.

When this fact is pointed out to the ideologue, he is indignant, but in fact he is in denial of the truth of ideology.

*

The day comes when we can no longer defend ourselves. Our positions immobilize and stiffen, and we are laid bare. The mobile and supple dance around our prostrate legacy, examining, analyzing, delineating, and legitimately knowing better.

*

Anaximander, again?

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

I just underlined a passage from Rorty, and wrote in the margin “D 481 – biography of a head”:

The point of constructing a “truth theory of English” is not to enable philosophical problems to be put in a formal mode of speech, nor to explain the relationship between words and the world, but simply to lay out perspicuously the relation between parts of a social practice (the use of certain sentences) and other parts (the use of other sentences).

Rorty does explicitly say that the use of language is “a fairly small portion of reality” – but still, 262 pages and counting of linguistic tail-chasing that never leaves the study, that never links use of language with use of other non-linguistic tools (like saws, or cars, or petri dishes, or dollars, or particle accelerators), used alongside other people (non-professors, who make their livings not only with their brains and tongues, but with their hands, feet, backs and hearts) in order to deal with non-human entities (including, but not limited to computers — stuff like like rocks, germs, laws, clouds, plants, etc.) is exasperating me and making me long for philosophy abstracted from something other than academics’ own word-soaked lives.

In Daybreak (481), Nietzsche said of Kant and Schopenhauer,

“…their thoughts do not constitute a passionate history of a soul; there is nothing here that would make a novel, no crises, catastrophes or death-scenes; their thinking is not at the same time an involuntary biography of a soul but, in the case of Kant, the biography of a head, in the case of Schopenhauer the description and mirroring of a character (‘that which is unalterable’) and pleasure in the ‘mirror’ itself, that is to say in an excellent intellect… “

I’ve been trying to see the relevance of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, but so far it seems to be little more than the history of some heads.

I love philosophy, but only if that philosophy is a reflection on fully-lived life — not a reflection on a reflection on a reflection on an abstraction.

There is no slope slipperier than a slippery slope argument.

There is no consciousness falser than that of the mind who sees false consciousness behind disagreements.

Thinking about thinking leads to errors about errors.

If you become enraged by the rage of others, you’ll justify rage.

The harder you look at something, the less you see your eyeball. And the harder you think about something the less you know your concepts.

The hardest part of studying history is knowing how to factor out the ideas that were inconceivable to the actors of history at that time — and grasping the impact of how an absence of these concepts might change how events might seem.

It is not mere absence of fact, it is absence of an ability to even see a fact if it is standing before you staring into your eyes. If you are having difficulties knowing what I mean by this — and many do! — others who will come later will have difficulty grasping how it was for you to look through this concept without seeing it.

Generally we think about users as the people for whom a design is made. Designers build systems intended to be used by users.

But it might make more sense to see users as an intrinsic part of a design. Designers build  systems composed of non-human and human elements. (The designed artifact is only part of the system a designer develops.)

This might make it easier for designers to explain to engineers why it is necessary to include users in the design process — users are one of the most fundamental materials from which the system is made. What competent engineer would build something without first knowing the materials thoroughly? It would also help designers extend the scope of design to often neglected organizational considerations (governance, support, editorial process, etc.) that determine the success of the design.

Engineered systems are composed of objective materials. Designed systems are composed of both objective and subjective materials. Both must understood their materials to build good functional stuff.

Philosophy as noun (“a philosophy”) and philosophy as verb (“doing philosophy”) are not the same.

The activity of philosophy should not be sequestered pondering. Philosophy should be part of other activities — especially activities whose aim is innovation, where established effective methods of thinking do not yet exist.

I accept Wittgenstein’s characterization of philosophy: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’.”

Philosophy does three things:

• Philosophy discovers as-yet-unposed problems.
• Philosophy develops ways to think as-yet-unthinkable thoughts.
• Philosophy integrates fragmentary knowledge into unified understandings.

A philosophy is a kind of design. A philosophy is an interface between a thinking being and reality.

Just like any design, a philosophy has a user (or “designand”), a purpose, a design context — and most of all, it requires trade-offs. And if it functions as it should it feels like a reality, not as an interpreted system of metaphors and images. Like any good design, a philosophy should disappear.

My belief is that philosophy is still in its pre-Macintosh phase. The user is other professional philosophers, the context tends to be professional forums — journals, conferences, etc. — and the trade-offs are usability and desirability, in favor of argumentative usefulness.

So, what I would like to present is my first attempt at a Macintosh GUI-style philosophy, abstracted from a life of user-centered design, (a.k.a. “design), to help me make sense of my designer’s life as a whole and to function better as a designer — and designed for usefulness, usability and most of all desirability.

This philosophy is built on a Pragmatist platform, and part of what that entails is that the ideas presented are not meant to represent a reality beyond us, but rather to help us behave toward reality in a way that is effective and beneficial, however we define it. So instead of telling you about what is real, I will present to you a set of mind-tools that I have found valuable for living the kind of life I have lived.

Again, I see this as an interface between me as a reflective designer and the reality I inhabit. I prefer graphical interfaces, so much of this philosophy will be graphical.

(At this point I will explain 3 or 4 of my diagrams in terms of what they do, when to use them, what the experience should be…)

(Time permitting, I will also present a few maxims, designed, again for use in specific contexts. We need pithy quotes to condense and drive home points we need to make. Why not make some specifically to forcefully express thoughts we need others to understand?)

Candidate maxims (I’ll probably choose 4 or 5):

• Any engineer will tell you, to make a system that functions, you must thoroughly understand your materials. The systems designers make include materials who perceive, conceive, feel, decide and speak. “Know your user” means “know your materials.”
• Realists must be connoisseurs of anxiety.
• If you want complacent comfort follow your bliss, but if you want growth, follow your dread.
• Inconceivable does not mean impossible or improbable. It means your mind is blind to something.
• Blindness is not dark. It shimmers in uncanny perfection: nothing there, nothing missing.
• When we look into darkness, nothing is there. When we are blind, nothing is missing.
• Vision itself is not visible. It is “seen” only through reflection on the act of seeing things.
• The man in the bar who wants to fight you wants to know you better. The bartender who listens to your life story does not.
• An indication of genuine love: Taking another’s nonsense seriously, attentively, patiently, but, ultimately, critically.
• Necessity is the mother of invention, but emergency is the father of regression.
• A compassionate listener is stingier than a student greedily consuming what is said.
• We resist deep change, not because we love the old or hate the new, but because of the intolerable span of dread that separates the old from the new.
• Sleeping, the mind is permitted to repose in native chaos and to move by accident, but chaos is as immemorable as foreign speech.
• Over breakfast, an evaporating dream is supplemented with a plot which displaces much of the dream’s truth — but which makes the dream memorable.
• A new concept becomes retroactively obvious to all who come to understand it. Even the concept of retroactive obviousness is itself retroactively obvious. At one point, I myself forgot that I did not invent the expression “retroactive obviousness” because it was so much my own.
• Concepts are the fingers of a comprehending mind. Con-cept, together-take. Com-prehend, together-grasp.
• During the day, heaven’s clear black depths are obliterated by a bright expanse of blue.
• Yogi Berra should have, but did not actually say: “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; but in practice there is.”
• On the stage, the most important actors have speaking parts, but in everyday life the opposite is true.

Added March 26, 2016

• Logic is not reason. Logic without empathy and empathy without logic are both unreasonable. Reason is the coordination of logic and empathy. A reasonable person listens both empathically and logically to understand what is being said by the one saying it.
• A concept is not a thing to be understood. A concept is that by which things are understood.
• Once we use a concept for understanding things, it is inconceivable to understand things any other way.
• We don’t love our old ideas, and we don’t hate new ones. What we hate is the intellectual vacuum separating old ideas from new ones: perplexity.
• To understand in any new way we must first approach, then enter, then navigate and then exit perplexity