In the context of the uses which link them, we have no particular difficulty in sustaining the distinction between physical objects and events as aspects of the world and our experience of them as aspects of the mind. The complications emerge when certain ways of thinking (typically, though not solely, associated with philosophical contexts) are introduced. The failure of these forms of thought to make sense of the distinction in the context of the link between the world in which objects and events exist and the mind in which experiences of them occur, suggests the concept of the relation is flawed. In any case it is impossible to reconcile these ways of thinking about the relationship with our experience and the sense we make of it which suggests that the world is somehow within and beyond the mind and that thought is an aspect of the world which like the mind itself remains, for all its engagement, distinct from it.

These notes contain in outline (and often no more than intuitively) a concept of relation which entails a different picture of the way reality works - one which accords with experience in allowing the mind to engage in the world while remaining distinct from it. The view emerging is that all forms of relation involve an overlap supported by a shift of aspect. The feature (which presides over the relation and distinction of all forms of expression and by extension over what is expressed) permits entities assuming an identical aspect (the thinker and the thought, thought and its object, the dancer and the dance) to be distinguished. This link embodied in relation is undetectable. The focus of the notes is on the undetectability, its consequences and how they determine our view of reality. In the absence of any conception of the link, our picture of reality is fragmentary and lacks sense, and the nature of relation itself - for example that of thoughts and experiences to the strangely elusive entities they are said to reflect - remains obscure. The shift of aspect, a versatile and ubiquitous presence in expression and perception, is the only significant piece of evidence pointing to the existence of such a link.

The overlap eludes the process of conception. It isn’t possible to see what relates a thing to something else and what distinguishes it at the same time. Words and ideas, for example, have a dual aspect – pointing inwards to experience and outwards to their objects simultaneously. But we cannot look both ways at once; and since it is this simultaneity (and the equilibrium it sustains) that constitutes a link, the limitation conditions our view of reality; we see things as either distinct or related and depend on the shift of aspect to move between these states. We have no alternative access to the relationship. Neither the shift of aspect or its function are revealed by analysis. Quite the opposite; the consequence of such investigation is to disrupt the link it is attempting to investigate.

The principle of overlapping enables an entity being distinguished to remain simultaneously related to something else (eg the mind to the world); it underlies the ‘many and one’ characteristic discernible in ordinary language whereby an aspect distinguished from the whole continues to form a part of it. The same principle underlies the transformative capacity of the process of thought - the quality which allows thought to be ‘of’ or ‘about’ something else. In respect of functional overlapping, Butler’s axiom that 'everything is what it is and not another thing' acquires the qualification that while remaining distinguishable, everything continues to exist as an aspect of something else. The former implies stasis; the latter, in allowing things to be seen under a different aspect, opens the way to transformation and change through relation.

The feature is common to all conceptual and expressive forms. In forms of thought and experience the overlap is embodied in ideas and impressions which present themselves and something beyond themselves (other ideas or things) to us. A shift of aspect takes us from the thought to the thing it invokes without apparently employing any means or encountering a boundary. The immediacy of this precipitation into the world accounts for certain anomalies which characterise the difference between people’s experiences, and philosophical views of the mind/world relation. People tend to be convinced they inhabit an autonomous world outside the mind experiencing it. While the evidence supporting this intuition comes from experiences, these are ordinarily seen as a reflection of events occurring in the world beyond. The mind itself seems to be the source of this convincing illusion of unmediated access to what many philosophers consider can be known only through mental entities of one kind or another; but whatever the case, the sense of being in a world rather than experiencing or dealing with a mental version of it is consistent with the occurrence of a mind/world shift which indeed places people inside a world determined by its relationship to the mind. The belief that the content of one is a reflection of the other probably arises from the impression of dual images engendered by the shift of aspect.

Although the metaphor of the mind as a reflection of the world (or reality) has is uses, it implies the existence of a discontinuity not evident in our experiences. Our experience is that the world in which we live and act enters the realm of mind seamlessly without the least disturbance to suggest where one might end and the other begin. Indeed idealists and realists have never been able to settle between themselves just what a person who inhabits the realms of experience is looking at - an entity of the mind or of the world. Common sense opts for ‘the world’ or ‘reality’, even when mistaken. The mistakes we make in this respect serve to underline the point that notwithstanding confident assertions to the effect material and mental entities aren’t the same (and they aren’t), we are thoroughly deceived by the resemblance between them in making mistakes. The ease with which we can confound one type of entity with the other and, given circumstances conducive to error, compound the mistake by producing a deceptively convincing amalgamation of the two, suggests the ambiguities inherent in the relationship between the mind and the world are far from resolved by schematically opposing them.

The potential for ambiguity and confusion is present in the commonest of our transactions with reality. When we arrange words and ideas, we arrange something else at the same time by the same act. The shift between mind and thing can occur at any point in the relationship once established. When I look at the cat what do I have in mind? The idea of a cat, without which I would not be seeing it? Or this creature in front of me, without which the idea would be meaningless? I can’t say can I? Apart from reciting the formula ‘The image of a cat’ which tells me only what it has always told me however many times I repeat it or telling myself ‘the image is the cat’ which it is and it isn’t in a sense we all (intuitively at least) understand, I can only conclude that I must interpret what I am seeing in accordance with the focus of my attention - seeing my impression as the cat when I have occasion to think of it as a creature of the world autonomously patrolling its own habitats; or as a mental entity when I reflect on my ideas of things or speculate on the impressions in my mind. As to the distinction between them; if I looked more closely and realised the cat was only a cushion on the sofa in the twilight, that too would be settled.

According to this account, reality alternates between the mind and the world by a shift of aspect. Our experience is consistent with this view. When I look at the cat I don’t have the impression it is an image in my mind - I see it as a cat in the world. But I can easily conceive it as having the aspect of an image in my mind by apprehending it in an appropriate context; and nothing changes except the significance attached to what I see (which perhaps is everything). What is not evident is how I find a way between the cat’s image in my mind and the cat in the world. In the event, the perception which seems to stand in the way is not an obstacle; the aspect shifts, and the image appearing to me becomes the cat’s. The drawback to this facility is that it works equally well with errors. Should I happen to mistake a cushion on the chair for the cat, the mind’s error is an aspect of the world - until the cushion vanquishes the cat anyway. The impression here is of the mind being in the world and the world in the mind, though in each case distinct unless they are confounded; this is an indication of the presence of the overlap relating the thought or experience to the thing, permitting shifts of aspect, and (from time to time) allowing errors and confusion.

The continuity between the mind and the world may seem to be the source of a problem. Given that the appearance of the cat in the mind ‘reflects’ that of the cat in the world, how do we distinguish the perception from the cat perceived? How are we supposed to draw a line between the cat and the image of it in our minds? And if we succeed in drawing a line, how are we to cross it? The difficulty, if there is one, issues from the circumstance that perceiving the cat entails a relationship which makes it an aspect of the mind. This is countered by its relationships to the things around it which distinguish the cat from the mind, drawing a line between them. These relationships are the source of our sense of its autonomy and aren’t controlled by the mind; but like the cat they become aspects of the mind by being apprehended.

In practice sustaining and dissolving these distinctions is rarely a problem; distinguishing experience from what is experienced or ideas and perceptions from the things they invoke and express is part of the activity of thinking and using language, and involves no special skills. Errors of application are made in this area of as in others, but the interface between the mind and the world and the distinctions involved aren’t of exceptional concern to the ordinary user of words and ideas. That in itself is interesting in the light of the constant movement between these realms. In philosophical thinking it may be impossible to cross the frontier. In ordinary expression the boundaries are sustained if the forms of language and thought used are sound. Innovation and abuses of expression may make it necessary to redefine them, but language and thought contain provision for this. Philosophical thinking and ordinary use entail quite different pictures of reality. In one the mind stands outside the world; in the other thought is woven into a pattern of reality which comprises both mind and world, retaining its distinctness and the distinctness of its contribution through the shift of aspect.

My perception is an aspect of the cat and the cat is an aspect of my perception. This overlapping relationship gets lost in words because words present it sequentially and distinctly; but it isn’t sequential and the occluded aspect only becomes distinct when it is revealed by a shift of aspect. We confuse our perceptions with the things which are supposed to be beyond them because an entity seems to stand within and beyond the bounds of the thought or perception that invokes it. Reality is inherently ambiguous and can be seen as an aspect of the conceiving mind or of the world perceived. Its ambiguity derives from functioning as an aspect of both and seeming to move between them. Reality as it is conceived or experienced has no determinate location until we ourselves assign it one by interpretation. It can be in the mind or the world - or in the process of migrating from one to the other by a shift of aspect. We may assign what we see to the wrong domain.

Ideas don’t literally become things. No more do experiences become forms of language. But we have the impression that this is exactly what does happen; things seem to migrate into the realm of thought and thoughts into the realm of things. The sense that the word or thought is the thing is at the root of mind-world difficulties. It persuades us that thought literally ‘goes into’ things – is invested in matter itself. The source of this deceptive impression is the shift of aspect whereby (for example) words seem to take on the aspect of our experiences of things, or things the aspect of the words expressing them. The apparent duality of mind and thing and the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between them are incidental consequences of the shift of aspect and the apparent autonomy both mind and world derive from it.

The problem the shift of aspect poses for the rationalising mind is that we cannot apprehend the relationships involved because an overlap places what is dealt with (the cat) within and beyond the means of dealing with it (our perception) in such a way as to defeat any hope of inspecting the relationship between the two. The same relationship underlies our intuitive experience of intentionality. Intentionality enables us to make mistakes, to get things right or wrong, or see them as right or wrong. The workings of the intentional relation are of critical importance, but impenetrable. Another indication of the defectiveness of the conceptual resources available to rationalists is the incapacity of rational language to provide a satisfactory account of such commonplace devices of thought as metaphors, paradoxes, ironies and ambiguities without first taking for granted their most significant feature - that they deal (like intentionality) with elements simultaneously related and distinguished; that is say, elements which ‘overlap’ and undergo changes of meaning through a shift of aspect leaving no evidence of how the aspects were related.

The shift of aspect confronts the rational mind with a unique obstacle in the form of a hiatus which it cannot detect, let alone traverse. Inspection reveals no link between the distinct entities related. This is the source of our impression that mind and the world along with experiences and what is experienced are either separate entities linked by something we have yet to discover or else must be one and the same. In some circumstances the evidence of experience suggests there is no distance at all between the mind and the world, that the transition (as we previously observed) is seamless and instantaneous. In other respects experience indicates there is a barrier and the barrier is nothing less than the conceptions and perceptions which in more propitious circumstances convey us immediately to what they are said to ‘reflect’ via a shift of aspect. Thus the mechanism of relation presents the inquiring mind with the equally inscrutable options of an open door or a blank wall. Neither is satisfactory or helpful.

The hiatus introduced by the shift of aspect creates an impasse for those seeking a logical route from the realm of mind into the autonomous domain of what can be known. Why else but because the knower stands at the brink of a chasm does the claim to know something (that the cat’s fur is smooth...) seem to attach itself to an entity beyond the impression which yields this information? What else but the void before it makes the claim to know something seem to amount to a claim to be able to transcend the toils of thought or perception and its contexts and arrive magically at a certainty about what lies beyond the mind? And in a sense this faith in transport without visible means is entirely justified by the outcome, since after the act of knowledge (or its failure) the fruits of knowledge (or those of error), having made their way across the great divide, become evident as features of the inaccessible kingdom.

The difficulty of understanding relation and its determining consequences arises from the obscurity of the means by which, in the course of normal activity and given that 'everything is what it is and not another thing', one thing becomes another or modifies another. That brings us to something worth noticing; the ease with which ordinary language overcomes the paradoxes which constantly baulk philosophical rationalism. Tacitly, this characteristic seems to have provided the foundation for the achievement of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. A primary function of language is to distinguish and relate things without revealing to the inquiring mind how it is done. The only demonstrable evidence of a sustaining link (ie an overlap) is the shift of aspect itself, whereby elements of the determining context become aspects of what is determined, thus transforming or modifying it (without ceasing to be aspects of the determining agent). But since what is changed is vanquished by what emerges from the change via the shift of aspect no enlightenment is obtained in the normal course of using language to bring about such changes.

The endeavours of the rationalising mind are equally unsuccessful, but for different reasons. Its attempt to discover a connection between distinct entities disrupts the functioning of the very thing it seeks to apprehend - the relationship holding between the aspects it is distinguishing and the shift between them. The interesting thing is that it should seem possible to us we might overcome this limitation and discover a link. The schizophrenic tendency exhibited here suggests the paradox which underlies our knowledge of things - that what we conceive and experience seems to us to exist in some absolute sense which has nothing to do with our seeing it in a particular context, situation or set of circumstances and so is unaffected by our choice of context. This is surely because the hiatus introduced by the shift of aspect divorces the knower’s context and its power of determination from the entity known - which consequently seems to stand free of the mind and its influence.

A good part of philosophical history has been taken up with a quest (misconceived as it turned out) to see what lies behind what we see. In a sense we do this all the time. That is, we investigate what lies behind appearances or behind the way people or things behave - usually extending our understanding in some degree in the process. As is often the case, however, commonplace activities employed in pursuit of philosophical knowledge are transformed and what would normally count as success no longer does. The strangeness of the philosophical quest was perhaps the wish to see without seeing in the sense that people wanted to transcend the determining factors invariably associated with instances of 'seeing' and 'knowing', factors conceived to make a difference to what is known. There was a time evidently when it was possible to believe the nature of reality could be discovered by delving behind things - although in the case of the materialist thinkers and their successors the result seems to have been a useful but different understanding of a world only paradoxically related (some might say ‘superveniently’) to the one yielded by our senses. What is of interest now for our purposes in this impulse to 'see without seeing' is the belief that it might be possible to transcend the limitation which prohibits access to what lies behind or beyond the mind's relationship to the phenomenal world. Perhaps it seemed if this could be done it might be possible to inspect the perplexing relationship between what is seen or known and what lies beyond it. Though it was an illusion to suppose this (since nothing lies beyond what is known in the sense envisaged), it is an illusion worth understanding.

Attempts to gain an insight into the relationship between mind and the world and other relationships bearing on it are compromised by the limitations of the forms of thought used in the investigation which obscure rather than reveal the nature of relation and its workings, substituting a mystery for the transparency of experience. Consequently the existence of a connection between language and thought and the physical world which they express becomes uncertain. Without a connection between mind and the entities which experiences and ideas represent as objective aspects of the world, the evidence supplied by experience becomes problematic, perhaps solipsistic - and in any case divorced from the sense of reality which informs the tenor of ordinary life. Isolated from its roots in experience, the evidence for the existence of reality becomes problematic.

The scope of these notes remains to be determined, but the subject will probably continue to be the role of the shift of aspect in language, thought and perception and its bearing on certain intractable difficulties affecting the nature of relation, change, reality, meaning and knowledge. Though sufficient for the purposes of the notes themselves, in two respects this definition no longer comprehends my own notion of the subject. In the first place I stopped thinking some time ago of shifts and overlaps as a feature of language and thought alone, coming round to the view it was just one form of a feature that would exist elsewhere. Since pursuing this conception of the subject would have made it unmanageable, I have held to my original view of it. The other discrepancy between my understanding of what I am doing and the view of it expressed here relates to the difference of perspective which enabled me to conceive the subject. I have attempted to give no account of it in the notes, though of course it is an aspect of what is expressed.

By way of avoiding, probably vainly, a misconception of what I am attempting to do, I should say at the outset that despite an obvious debt to the discipline of philosophy, it was not the intention these thoughts should be cast in the mould of philosophical discourse. It would have proved impossible to pursue the aims envisaged within the constraints imposed by a traditional philosophical conception of the problems involved. In any case the question didn't arise, since the inquiry was precipitated neither by an academic interest in the subject or an inclination to engage in the 'disinterested' pursuit of knowledge. The issue as it came to present itself (largely by an accident of circumstances) was not a philosophical doubt whether anything exists and can be known, but the unresolved and apparently neglected question of how reality (in the mundane sense) works, given that the picture we have of it seems to suggest it shouldn't. Perhaps the most illuminating insights, as often, were to be gained by examining examples of failure, in this instance of the relationship between mind and its objects, thus focusing on those occasions which tend to reinforce the philosopher's scepticism of the claim to know what lies beyond the mind. The debt to philosophical scepticism will be obvious to anyone familiar with its methods, though its conclusions have no place in the views advanced here.

It should be emphasised these are working notes. The problem with publishing material not originally intended to communicate a meaning to others is that it first has to be removed from the context in which it was designed to make sense. Inevitably, acts of self-communication contain obscurities that wouldn't be in work intended for publication. Probably too, the mind discoursing with itself is more tolerant of an absence of clarity, sometimes for reasons which do not stand up well to scrutiny. The justification offered for publishing the notes in this form is that they aren’t likely to be available in any other and there may be things of interest in them, ideas that stimulate thought or prove useful in other contexts. Though nonsense doubtless forms an aspect of the sense, in accordance with the principles of natural selection, whatever serves no purpose is neglected in the long run and what proves useful evolves by employment.

NOTE: the references in square brackets in Sections 1-4 can be ignored; those in parenthesis were not intended for the reader but may be helpful on occasions.

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