By now, a certain shape should be visible.
It has to do with understanding—but not understanding as access, simulation, or feeling-with. It has to do with orientation: with knowing where meaning is being made, and being able to locate oneself in relation to that place.
To name this more precisely, we need a single idea that can hold together difference, relation, and understanding without collapsing them.
That idea is the cut.
What a “cut” is—and isn’t
A cut is a distinction that makes relation possible.
Without distinctions, everything blurs together. Without a cut, there is no “here” and “there,” no “this perspective” and “that one.” Relation requires difference—but difference of a very particular kind: difference that is held, not erased.
The empathic cut is precisely this kind of distinction.
Two familiar failures
To see why the cut matters, it helps to name two ways empathy commonly fails.
In one failure mode, the other person is treated as an object in my field: something to be explained, categorised, diagnosed, or managed. Their experience is talked about, but never encountered as a source of meaning in its own right.
In the other failure mode, the distinction between us collapses entirely. I imagine myself into their situation so fully that their perspective becomes indistinguishable from my own. Their meaning is replaced by my version of what it would be like to be them.
These failures look opposite, but they share a common problem.
In both cases, the other person never appears as a centre of meaning.
What the empathic cut does
The empathic cut does something very specific.
It establishes the other person as a locus from which meaning is being made—without absorbing that locus into my own, and without pushing it outside my field of understanding.
This is a delicate achievement.
Empathy consists in holding this cut steady while coordinating across it.
Asymmetry without hierarchy
One of the most important features of the empathic cut is its asymmetry.
I do not stop being me in order to understand you. I do not give up my perspective, suspend my judgments, or evacuate my commitments. Nor do I require you to align with mine.
The relation is not symmetrical, but it is also not hierarchical.
Your perspective does not become subordinate to mine. Nor does mine dissolve into yours. Each remains what it is—distinct, located, and limited.
Empathy does not erase these limits. It works because of them.
Why this is harder than it sounds
Holding the empathic cut is difficult.
It requires resisting two powerful impulses:
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the impulse to translate everything immediately into one’s own terms
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the impulse to dissolve difference in the name of closeness
Both impulses feel generous. Both promise connection. Both undermine understanding.
The cut demands restraint: the willingness to let another’s meaning remain partially foreign, partially opaque, and yet still intelligible as meaning.
This is why empathy can feel effortful rather than comforting. It is not the warmth of fusion, but the discipline of relation.
Empathy as an act, not a trait
Seen this way, empathy is not a stable disposition or personality trait. It is not something one “has” more or less of in general.
It is an act.
It happens—or fails to happen—in particular moments, under particular conditions. It can be achieved in one interaction and lost in the next. It can be sustained briefly and then collapse.
This explains why even caring, reflective people can fail at empathy, and why moments of genuine empathy can feel rare and fragile.
What the cut makes possible
Once the empathic cut is in place, a great deal becomes possible.
You can understand a position you reject. You can recognise a pain you do not share. You can track a logic you would never adopt as your own.
None of this requires emotional alignment. Some of it may involve emotion. But the core operation is orientational.
Empathy is the act of recognising another as a centre of meaning whose perspective is not yours—and coordinating understanding across that difference.
Where we go next
Naming the empathic cut clarifies what empathy is. But it also raises a new question:
If empathy is about coordination across a cut, what exactly is coordinated?
If not feelings, and not values, then what moves—or fails to move—between perspectives when empathy succeeds?
The next post will take up this question directly.
We will look at coordination without fusion: the specific elements that can align across perspectives while leaving the cut intact.
That is where empathy’s precision becomes fully visible.
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