Last time I noted Concepts (e.g., houseness) are inherently vague and indeterminate, but can be clarified by triangulating or intersecting related concepts. This means comparing and contrasting to un-cover from hiddenness. My basic example is houseness is “present” in an incarnate or exemplary way in the mansion, merely present in the average house, and deficient in the dilapidated house. Now, the next viewer may experience the mansion as gaudy and the shack as quaint/rustic. The other example I like is Niagara Falls may “appear” as a wonder of the world to the tourist, background scenery to the local commuter, or noise pollution to the local resident. On the other hand, the next local resident may love it even more than the tourist in that they are so intimately acquainted with it. And, the next tourist may be very let down as the waterfall fails to live up to expectations. Everything depends on the way the observer takes the object, so there is no hermetically sealed subject as Descartes thought. This helps us see beyond the binary opposites of structuralism.

Our examples illustrate a phenomenological insight with real force: concepts like houseness or the “meaning” of Niagara Falls are not fixed, self-contained essences that objects either fully possess or lack. They emerge in the interplay between the thing and the way it is taken up by an observer who is already situated, interested, and historically formed.The graded presence we describe—exemplary in the mansion, average in the ordinary house, deficient in the dilapidated one—echoes Aristotle’s treatment of virtues as means, but more closely recalls Heidegger’s analysis of how entities show themselves in different modes of disclosure (unconcealment / aletheia). Houseness is not a property that is either “on” or “off”; it is a way of being that can be more or less fully realized, and that realization is never independent of the horizon of concerns against which the building appears. The next observer who finds the mansion gaudy and the shack quaint is not simply “wrong”; that observer is disclosing a different, equally real aspect of the same phenomena. The triangulation we recommend—comparing and contrasting related cases—is precisely the work of making those aspects explicit, of bringing what was taken for granted into the open.The Niagara Falls example sharpens the point. The falls are not a neutral object that then receives subjective projections. Their very being-as-wonder, being-as-background, being-as-noise, or being-as-intimate-familiarity is co-constituted by the practical and affective stance of the one who encounters them. There is no Descartes-style pure subject sealed off from the world, nor a pure object waiting to be accurately represented. Perception and meaning are already interpretive and worldly.This move does help dissolve the rigid binary oppositions that structuralism sometimes imposed (presence/absence, signifier/signified, subject/object). Once concepts are understood as indeterminate fields that become determinate only through concrete, situated intersections, the sharp either/or begins to look artificial. What remains is a more fluid, relational field in which differences of degree, perspective, and context are primary.The same logic can be extended further. “Beauty,” “justice,” “home,” “tool,” even “personhood” all behave this way: they are clarified not by seeking a definition that seals them once and for all, but by moving among the exemplary, the average, the deficient, the surprising, and the disappointing cases, always attentive to how different observers take them up. The work of philosophy, on this view, is less the discovery of hidden essences and more the patient uncovering of the manifold ways things can show themselves.

It also clarifies the meaning of being as “presence” that we’ve thought about since the Greeks like with Plato in the Gorgias. When I say houseness is “present’ in the average house, “presence” is indeterminate and vague on its own until the difference between mere presence and exemplary presence of the mansion and deficient presence of the shack “lights up” what the mere presence of my average house means.

This is a crucial clarification. Once we treat “presence” itself as the basic sense of being that has guided Western thought since the Greeks, the same indeterminacy appears at a more fundamental level.“Presence” (parousia, Anwesenheit) is not a fully determinate concept on its own. When we say that houseness is present in the average house, that claim remains vague and under-determined until the contrasts light it up. The mansion shows us what exemplary or incarnate presence of houseness looks like; the dilapidated shack shows us deficient presence. Only against those poles does the “mere” presence of the ordinary house become visible as mere. The differences do not merely illustrate an already clear notion of presence; they first make the notion of presence determinate enough to be thought.This is why the Greek understanding of being as presence is both powerful and limited. Plato (whether in the Gorgias, the Republic, or elsewhere) already works with degrees and modes of presence: the Form is fully present, the particular participates in it more or less adequately. Yet the very meaning of “presence” tends to remain presupposed rather than interrogated. The triangulation we describe — exemplary / mere / deficient — is one way of forcing that presupposition into the open. Presence is no longer a self-evident starting point; it is something that shows itself only through the play of its own intensifications and diminutions.The same structure can be applied to other traditional terms for being: actuality, substance, appearance, even “truth as correctness.” Each remains cloudy until its internal differences of degree and mode are allowed to illuminate one another. In that sense, our approach is a way of doing ontology by attending to the concrete ways things show up, rather than by seeking a single definition that would seal the meaning of presence once and for all. The observer’s stance remains decisive here as well. What counts as “exemplary” presence for one person may appear excessive or deficient for another, which means that the lighting-up of presence is itself never purely objective. Presence and the way of taking presence remain co-determined.