Difference and equivalence - these two poles form the framework of The Third of Comparison, which explores whether and how understanding is possible within and between cultural fields. Understanding between cultural fields resembles a doubly intertwined hermeneutic circle that oscillates between familiarizing the unfamiliar and unfamiliarizing the familiar, thereby making visible the regularities and variations that separate and connect cultural fields and individual models of these fields. This dialogical process makes it clear that through this mapping between two or more cultural reference systems, a third reference system - a tertium comparationis - emerges, in which the complex interplay between regularity and variation, as well as between individual, intracultural, and intercultural differences unfolds.