Once the empathic cut is in place, empathy begins to look less mysterious—and more exacting.
The other person has appeared not as an object to be explained, nor as a version of myself to be simulated, but as a genuine centre of meaning organised from a position that is not mine.
The question now becomes practical:
What, exactly, is coordinated across that difference when empathy succeeds?
If not feelings, and not values, then what moves between perspectives?
What empathy does not coordinate
It helps to begin with what empathy does not require.
People can empathise deeply while feeling very different things, wanting incompatible outcomes, or standing on opposite sides of a dispute.
This is not a failure of empathy. It is often the condition for it.
The coordination of attention
One of the first things empathy coordinates is attention.
To empathise is to learn what the other person is attending to—and what they are not. It is to recognise which elements of a situation are foregrounded, which recede into the background, and which are not even visible from that position.
Misunderstanding often arises not because we disagree about facts, but because we are attending to different aspects of the same situation.
Empathy reorients attention without demanding agreement.
The coordination of relevance
Closely related to attention is relevance.
Empathy involves grasping what counts as relevant from the other person’s perspective. What details matter? What distinctions make a difference? What lines of reasoning will feel responsive rather than evasive?
This is why empathic understanding is visible in the shape of one’s responses. An empathic response does not merely sound caring; it addresses what the other person takes to be at issue.
Relevance cannot be inferred from feeling alone. It has to be learned.
The coordination of salience
Empathy also coordinates salience: what stands out as significant.
Two people can agree on what is happening and still disagree profoundly about what matters most within it. Empathy does not force a shared ranking of importance, but it does require recognising the ranking that is in play for the other.
This is why someone can feel unheard even when everything they said was repeated back to them. Their words were acknowledged, but their salience structure was not.
The coordination of expectation
Another crucial element is expectation.
If you understand someone, you can anticipate where they are likely to object, what they will find reassuring, and what will feel like a non sequitur. You know what kinds of moves make sense from their position, even if you would never make those moves yourself.
This anticipatory capacity is a strong indicator of empathy. It shows that you are oriented within the other person’s perspective rather than merely reacting to its surface features.
Why values are not the core
At this point, it is tempting to say that empathy coordinates values.
But this temptation should be resisted.
Values often enter empathic situations, but they are not what empathy primarily coordinates. People can understand one another’s values while rejecting them, or share values while misunderstanding each other entirely.
Empathy operates at a more basic level: the level at which things become intelligible as meaningful at all.
This is why empathy can precede moral judgment rather than replace it.
Fusion and its discontents
Fusion—the collapse of perspectives into a shared emotional or moral space—can feel powerful. It can produce solidarity, comfort, and a sense of unity.
But fusion comes at a cost.
When perspectives fuse, the cut disappears. And when the cut disappears, empathy becomes unnecessary—because difference has been erased rather than understood.
This is why fusion is unstable. It cannot survive disagreement, divergence, or change in stakes. The moment difference reasserts itself, the sense of empathy collapses.
Coordination without fusion, by contrast, can survive precisely because it does not depend on sameness.
The discipline of holding the cut
Coordination across a cut is not automatic. It requires discipline.
It involves slowing down interpretation, resisting premature translation, and being willing to ask not “How do I feel about this?” but “How is this organised from there?”
This discipline is often uncomfortable. It denies the immediate reward of emotional certainty. It can feel less generous than identification and less comforting than sympathy.
But it is also more precise—and more durable.
What empathy actually achieves
When empathy succeeds, something subtle but powerful happens.
Another person’s perspective becomes navigable.
You may not like where it leads. You may not want to stay there. You may choose to oppose it.
But you can move within it without distortion.
That is what coordination without fusion makes possible.
Where this leaves us
At this point, we have a working account of empathy:
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It involves a cut that preserves difference.
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It coordinates attention, relevance, salience, and expectation across that cut.
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It does not require emotional alignment or value convergence.
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It is an act, not a trait.
All that remains is to ask why this is so often hard to sustain—and why so many well-intentioned attempts at empathy collapse into something else.
The final posts in the series will take up these questions directly.
Next, we’ll look at how empathy fails: not as a moral shortcoming, but as a set of predictable structural errors.
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