I’d like to measure ideas of presence against this schema. Locke lays out what is basically an empirical approach to knowing the world: what we can know is based in material, perceptual experience and assumptions we can draw from its consistency through common or repeated instances of such experience. Some things, Locke allows, are properly to be taken on faith and are not susceptible to proof or reason, whereas there are still other things that he argues are so contrary to reason that they should be dismissed.

It’s this third element that I want to press further, for experience that contradicts reason so permeates our lives that I think it’s useful not only to try to take it into account but to exploit it as valuable.

     The eliciting power of presence. Presence generating further presence. The
     crafting of presence that by its very manufacture gives lie to the possibility of
     presence. The unprovable and irrational as mediating agents of presence.