I’ve been writing a lot about threes, like how the threefold degrees of houseness (mansion, average house, dilapidated shack) gives us a clear picture of the concept

In that vein of threes, we might also see how the “threefold cord” is a metaphor for strength through unity and partnership. Ecclesiastes 4:12 says “And though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.” Common applications include:

Friendship and community: Two people provide mutual support, but adding a third (or more) creates robust resilience against life’s challenges, attacks, or difficulties.

Marriage with God at the center: A very popular Christian interpretation sees the three strands as husband, wife, and God. With God intertwined, the marriage (or relationship) becomes much harder to break. This is widely used in wedding ceremonies, vows, and marriage teachings.

Broader spiritual or communal applications: Some see it as referring to the presence of God with two or more gathered (echoing Matthew 18:20), or the power of fellowship in the church/community. Jewish midrashic traditions have also linked it symbolically to the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob).

Practical teamwork: In leadership, business, or personal development contexts, it illustrates how teams or support networks provide stability that individuals lack.

The core idea is progressive strength: one is weak, two are better, and three (or more, braided together) offer exceptional durability.

And so, in Philosophy, we see this application of 3s, e.g., True Being – deficient Being (me on, becoming)-nothing (ouk on).  From Hegel we are familiar with thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

Similarly, with traditional German phenomenology wea have the threefold intentional structure, and so regarding time: There is a threefold intentional relation when it comes to time, the counter (intentio), counted (intentum), and the counted as countable: perceiving – perceivedness of the perceived – perceived.  For example, a book may seem boring, but if there is no counter, boringness as the stretching out of time does not exist.  Similarly, if there is no mind directing the flow of time, there is no flow: e.g., flowing backward (Christmas is coming -> is here -> is gone) vs marching forward (In a few days I’ll make it to Christmas).

This highlights the problem of transcendence, how an isolated I/ego is going to leap beyond itself to knowledge of the world: Ego-World.  Kant particularly attacked this problem and so posited a third term, the faculty of the imagination to mediate between sense and the faculty of rules (the understanding).  For example, the understanding recognizes the figure in front of me as a triangle because the shape fits the rule of 3-sided enclosed figure. 

Hume’s skepticism included the observation that we don’t sense causality of B following A according to a rule, but our mind associates A and B because the one follows the other all the time.  Kant countered we do recognize causality as 3-fold irreversibility of positive (ball hits ball – mere one-directedness), comparatively greater (freezing water is a temporary change of state), and superlatively (a cooked egg can’t be uncooked).  This is not arbitrary because superlative (complete) causality is only recognized in the egg case and not the other two.  So, there is a union of person and world prior to the self-world division.  There is then a translation between the world and the I that allows causality to be experienced, and this is Heidegger’s more primordial Being-in-the-world that ego-ness and world-ness are abstracted from.  This is like what we said previously how a hidden proto-language is going to allow us to translate from English, to French, to Greek, etc.  So, in the case of boredom, there is my being bored – the boring show – the boringness of the show.  Boringness is obviously a trait of the show, even though the next person need not find it boring.

Regarding the hidden proto language which allows the movement between languages, by analogy we might think of the third, Tertium comparationis (Latin for “the third [term] of comparison”) is the common ground, shared property, or basis that allows two (or more) different things to be meaningfully compared.

When you compare two things (A and B), you need a third element (C) — the tertium comparationis — that links them. Without this third term, the comparison falls apart or becomes meaningless: A  C (tertium comparationis)  B: “Time is money”Tertium comparationis: Both are valuable resources that can be spent, saved, wasted, or invested.  Without this shared aspect (resource/value), comparing time and money would make no sense.  Comparing a heart to a pump (in biology or engineering)Tertium comparationis: Both move fluid by rhythmic contraction/expansion.  “Juliet is the sun” (Shakespeare)Tertium comparationis: Both are radiant, life-giving, and central to the speaker’s world.

Legal or philosophical reasoning: When arguing that two cases should be treated the same, lawyers or philosophers identify the tertium comparationis — the relevant shared feature (e.g., both involve “foreseeable harm” or “voluntary consent”).  In Logic/Rhetoric this is the common attribute enabling an analogy or metaphor.  In Linguistics: The invariant element in translation or semantic comparison.  In Philosophy the shared criterion used in analogical reasoning.  In Comparative Law: The common legal principle or fact pattern.  In Literature: The ground of a simile or metaphor

A weak or unclear tertium comparationis leads to false analogies or bad metaphors. Strong ones produce insightful comparisons. Identifying it explicitly is a key critical thinking skill — it forces you to ask: “In what specific respect are these two things being compared?”  In short:  Tertium comparationis = the “because” behind a comparison. It’s the hidden third term that makes the comparison work.

What is very interesting when we look at Being is we really phenomenalize what we mean in contrast or degrees, which means Heraclitus was right about the fundamentality of the Logos or language: Positive, comparative, and superlative are the three degrees of comparison used with adjectives and adverbs in English grammar.

Critical scholars generally agree the trinity was not part of the earliest understanding of Jesus, but this later 3-fold characterization allowed for a vivid characterization bringing out how the ancients were trying to understand their God,

The doctrine emphasizes these three interconnected truths about God: Unity / Oneness (One God in Essence/Nature/Being): There is only one true God, not three. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit fully share the same divine essence, attributes (e.g., omnipotence, omniscience, holiness, eternity), power, and will. They are not “parts” that add up to God; each is fully God, and together they are the one undivided God. This upholds strict monotheism while allowing for relational depth within God.

Distinction / Three Persons (Relational Diversity): The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct “Persons” (hypostases), not identical or interchangeable. They relate to one another eternally (e.g., the Father begets the Son; the Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son). They have distinct roles in creation, redemption, and sanctification, while remaining one in being. For example: Father: Often associated with creation, authority, and sending the Son.  Son (Jesus): The incarnate Word, redeemer who becomes human, reveals the Father, and accomplishes salvation.  Holy Spirit (Holy Ghost): The one who indwells believers, convicts, comforts, empowers, and sanctifies.

Equality / Co-equality and Co-eternality: All three Persons are fully and equally divine, with no hierarchy in essence or glory. They have always existed together (no one is created or subordinate in being). This also implies God is inherently relational and loving within Himself—eternal love and communion exist among the Persons, so “God is love” (1 John 4:8) doesn’t depend on creation.

In other words, God is the sovereign of reality (Father) but gets us because he is one of us and has the right to judge us with himself as a benchmark because he lived a sinless life (Jesus), and is with us boosting us in our quest for righteousness, indwelling (Holy Spirit).

(ii)

Regarding the notion of threes, I previously talked about tri-angulating the meaning of houseness by contrasting (i) the mansion as houseness incarnate (Now that’s a house!) with (ii) houseness being merely present in the average house, and (iii) houseness being deficient in the dilapidated shack.  I added the deconstructive rejoinder of (iv) the mansion as gawdy and (v) the shack quaint/rustic, but for the moment lets stay with the original 3.

This is a perfectly valid and natural metaphorical use of “tri-angulating.” “Triangulate” (in its figurative sense) means using multiple reference points to locate, define, or refine something that isn’t directly measurable or obvious — exactly like fixing a position in navigation by measuring angles from known points. In research, philosophy, linguistics, and conceptual analysis, people routinely speak of “triangulating” meaning, concepts, or ordinary usage by cross-referencing different sources, perspectives, or examples.

Our approach does this elegantly:

(i) The mansion — the prototypical or ideal exemplar (“houseness incarnate” / “Now that’s a house!”). This gives you the peak or full realization of the concept.

(ii) The average house — houseness present in a typical, unremarkable instance. This anchors the everyday core.

(iii) The dilapidated shack — houseness deficient, marginal, or barely qualifying. This marks the fuzzy boundary or degree of degradation.

By contrasting these three points (strong positive, neutral/moderate, and weak/negative), we create a conceptual “triangle” that lets us better pin down what “houseness” consists in — its essential features, gradations, family resemblances, or threshold conditions. This is reminiscent of

Prototype theory in cognitive linguistics.

Aristotelian ideas of focal meaning or degrees of being.

Philosophical methods that use clear cases, borderline cases, and contrasts to analyze concepts.

This method is especially strong for concepts with degrees or vagueness (like “house,” “art,” “game,” “personhood,” etc.). It highlights what’s central, peripheral, or missing.

(iii)

Now, what Derrida is going to do is overturn the characterization of Cohen by Rosenzweig  as exemplarily Jewish/German (The way we may speak of the tragic Greek soul who thought its destiny was to wander forever as a restless shade). 

The Jewish-German Psyche: The Examples of Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig by Jacques Derrida:

Insisting on the word example, we open onto several questions. (1) What is exemplarity (rather than paradigm) in the history of national self-affirmation? What happens when a “people” presents itself as exemplary? Or when a “nation” declares itself endowed with a mission by virtue of its very uniqueness; as of bearing testimony, and of having a responsibility, all of which are exemplary; in other words, of bringing a universal message? (2) In what sense and how have the Jewish and German people been able to declare themselves as exemplary in terms of this “exemplarity”?  Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion (p. 139). Taylor & Francis. Kindle Edition.

Rosenzweig is going to set up a contrast between the average University professor and Cohen as an exemplar, a philosopher incarnate in his manner and content of speech.

I then had an uncommon surprise. Being used to encounter in chairs of philosophy intelligent people of fine, sharp, elevated, profound mind … I then met a philosopher. Instead of tightrope-walkers, showing off their more or less audacious, clever or graceful tricks on the high wire of thought, I saw a man. There was nothing there of that disconcerting vacuity or of that useless character which seemed to me to encumber nearly all the academic philosophical proceedings of the period, and which forced everyone to keep wondering why such and such an individual among all others, why just this one went in for philosophy rather than something else. With Cohen, the question no longer arose, and there was an unfailing sense that he, for one, could do nothing but philosophy, that he was inhabited by that precious force which the powerful word compels to manifest itself. That which, led astray by what the present had to offer, I gave up looking for long since except in the Great Dead, that learned and rigorous mind that knows how to meditate over the abyss, of a world still plunged in the confusion of a reality threatened by chaos, that is what I all of a sudden met in Cohen, face to face, incarnated in a living speech (“Un hommage”).  A somewhat different English version of this passage is to be found in Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1961) p. 29–Tr.  Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion (pp. 141-142). Taylor & Francis. Kindle Edition.

Derrida asks

What is thus being revealed to Rosenzweig? A Jew, nothing less than the essence of the Jew, but also of the German Jew. And one cannot very well tell whether he is more purely Jewish because he is a German Jew or essentially Jewish and on top of that, by some accident or otherwise, also a German Jew. The ambiguity is remarkable; for it is with this German Jew, with a particular way of being a German Jew, Jewish and German (I shall return to one of Rosenzweig’s letters which says, “Let us then be Germans and Jews. Both at the same time, without worrying about the and, without talking about it a great deal, but really both”), that Rosenzweig, like Scholem and Buber in a different way, will eventually break, despite the respect that Cohen still inspired, this great figure of rationalist German German Judaism, liberal and non-Zionist if not assimilationist, this Jewish and German thinker.  Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion (p. 142). Taylor & Francis. Kindle Edition.

Derrida probes further into the force of Cohen’s peaking

Boiling over, eruption, gushing forth out of untold depths, mixture of water and fire, but especially the convulsive rhythm of the flow of lava—such is Cohen’s speech.  Convulsion, the convulsive tremor which marks the rhythm of volcanic production and scans the jet or projection of lava, the ejaculation of liquid fire, is also the tempo of discontinuous rhetoric, and that too is Cohen’s speech. In it Rosenzweig recognizes that caesura in rhetorical composition, the aphoristic quality of a speech that cares nothing for composition or is composed of an irregular series of aphoristic interruptions. But he recognizes it primarily as a property of Jewish speech— Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion (p. 142). Taylor & Francis. Kindle Edition.

Rozenweig discovers Cohen’s exemplary Jewish/Germanic in his speech, particularly things like its abrupt breaks

By what enchantment was this man’s speech inhabited? His speech rather than his writings, which a certain distance tarnished somewhat. His speech gave the impression of a volcano smouldering under a smooth surface; as it would sometimes be weaving its web, placing itself squarely in the rigorous treatment of some problem, while the audience saw the flow of thoughts stream under the powerful brow, Cohen’s personality would at a certain moment erupt like lightning, suddenly and without transition, unexpectedly and unpredictably. An attitude struck infrequently, a gesture of the hand—although he spoke with hardly a gesture, in fact it was necessary not to take one’s eyes off him—a single word or a very brief sentence of five or six words and the sluggish flow would expand to the dimensions of an overflowing sea, the light of a world brought back to life from the bottom of the human heart would gush out of the web of thought. It is precisely the total immediacy of these eruptions which endowed them with a decisive power. This perfectly spontaneous boiling over of a pathos emerging out of underground sources, the close coexistence of the coldest thought and the most passionate feeling—surely there is nothing more Jewish than this lack of transition. In fact this German, this German Jew of such a straight, such a free, such an elevated conscience [or consciousness—tr.], was undoubtedly, in the deepest attachments of his soul, much more Jewish and purely so than all those who today claim with evident nostalgia that they are purely Jewish (“Un hommage”; my italics).  The last paragraph seems rather odd. I would underline its allusion to the system. The encomium emphasizes primarily Cohen’s uniqueness and solitariness: he is the only one today, the only one of his generation to do this or that, he stands apart from the “crowd” and from “the crowd of his contemporaries.”  Rozenweig in Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion (p. 144). Taylor & Francis. Kindle Edition.

Cohen is going to argue there is a Germanness with its history and is intricately entwined with Jewishness.

It is, says Cohen in fact, “what must have repeatedly occurred (ereignen) within the relation between Germanity and Judaism, even if this relation was mediated by Christianity at the turning points which profoundly marked the history of the German spirit.” Cohen underlines this last part of the sentence: “an inneren Wendepunkten in der Geschichte des deutschen Geistes ereignen” (§2). A strong sentence and an odd one: it says that there is a German spirit, that this spirit has or is a history marked by events, decisive events, which constitute turns or turning points. At each turning point, each curve, each turn or bent of the German mind, an originary “force” namely the Jewish genealogy or lineage, must have played a marking role. The German comes to terms (auseinandersetzt) with the Jew at each decisive turn of his history, in history as history of the spirit, and, in an exemplary manner, as history of the German spirit. In coming to terms with the Jew, the German comes to terms with himself since he carries and reflects Judaism within himself: not in his blood but in his soul. Or in his spirit. Not in his blood, for this genealogy is not a natural but an institutional, cultural, spiritual, and psychic one. Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion (p. 149). Taylor & Francis. Kindle Edition.

The halt, of course, is that Cohen and Rosenzweig were saying these things before the second world war, and so were not seeing the powerful ant-semitism of the Nazi era.  But that is precisely the point with exemplars, and so I return to the housness incarnate of the mansion, unless it appears gawdy to you.

More on this essay by Derrida next time.