THINKING IN FOURS

1. I often think in terms of fours, for example in terms of four basic Elements - fire, water, vegetation (earth), and air; in terms of four devotional ideals - beauty, strength, knowledge, and truth; in terms of four emotional ideals - love, pride, pleasure, and joy; in terms of four musical ingredients - rhythm, harmony, melody, and pitch; in terms of four types of literature - poetry, drama, fiction, and philosophy; in terms of four types of human being - devil, woman, man, and god; in terms of four religious conditions and/or places - hell, purgatory, earth, and heaven; in terms of four subatomic elements - photons, electrons, neutrons, and protons; in terms of four major disciplinary categories - science, politics, economics, and religion; in terms of four modes of ideological negativity - materialism, realism, naturalism, and idealism; in terms of four modes of ideological positivity - fundamentalism, nonconformism, humanism, and transcendentalism; in terms of four elemental conditions - metachemistry, chemistry, physics, and metaphysics; in terms of four fine arts - art, sculpture, literature, and music; in terms of four planes of existence - space, time, volume, and mass; in terms of four somatic/psychic faculties - will, spirit, ego, and soul; and so on and so forth.

2. There are, of course, other ways of thinking, and I also often find myself thinking in terms of one or another of them - for example, gods the Wise Son and the Wise Father, and heavens the Holy Soul and the Holy Spirit; or men the Wise Son and the Wise Father, and earths the Holy Soul and the Holy Spirit; or women the Good Daughter and the Good Mother, and purgatories the Unclear Soul and the Unclear Spirit; or devils the Good Daughter and the Good Mother, and hells the Unclear Soul and the Unclear Spirit; not to mention clear and unholy orders of both soul and spirit, and evil and foolish orders of both ego and will, as germane to females and males in sensuality as opposed to sensibility. Even these ways of thinking can be turned into quadruplicities of sorts, albeit with a dualistic balance and requirement.

3. I am, as you will have guessed, a thinker, a philosopher, albeit very much self-taught and therefore self-respecting, and therefore I make it my business, my concern, to think logically and comprehensively, and even doggedly and boldly, not to say cautiously and sceptically, about a large variety of issues and contexts, some of which are more philosophical than others, but all of which, whether strictly metaphysical or not, contribute to the overall perspective in which this fits here and that fits there, and without a prior knowledge of the status of this as against the status of that, no certain or, at any rate, sustainable estimation of both relative and absolute values, premised upon a sense of what belongs where and why, would be possible.

4. So much for introductions! The thing I would now like to emphasize is a new way of looking at history or, rather, at a totality, if you will, of possible or actual circumstances which, whether or not strictly historical, would owe quite a lot to this tendency of mine to think in terms of four, as, for example, in terms of four ages or, better, conditions of life. After all, others, including the great John Bunyan, have done likewise, if with a different perspective and from a different standpoint. There are, for example, with Spengler four ages or phases of life - what he called 'Historyless Chaos', 'Culture', 'Civilization', and 'Second Religiousness'. This is not the place to discuss his theories of history, but my own latent theorizing would owe something to such a fourfold classification, though I flatter myself to say little or nothing to Spengler!

5. I shall start by laying my cards on the table, so to speak, and then proceed to discuss each one of them in some detail thereafter, striving, as far as possible, to justify my position, and making some effort, in the process, to analyse and define each of the major categories in the game. These, in more or less the following order, are Cosmos, Nature, Man, and Cyborg.

6. In other words, I am going to elaborate upon a theory of life which embraces four main categories of existence, each with its own characteristics and integrities, some of which overlap with others, but all of which add up, if my theories are credible, to a new way of conceiving of both the Universe, as it were, and Man's place in it.

7. Therefore, to repeat, things are conceived of as proceeding, in very broad terms, from the Cosmos to the Cyborg via Nature and Man, as though, in general terms, from fire to air via water and vegetation or, alternatively, from doing to being via giving and taking.

8. Now in order to proceed any further we shall need to ask: What is the Cosmos? And what is Nature? And what is Man? And what is the Cyborg? - I shall attempt an answer for each category, not definitive of course or even necessarily standard, but such that will lend support to our theory of a sort of chronological progression from alpha to omega via 'the world', and thereby clarify the distinctions between the four main components of life as we are conceiving of it. For life does not begin with Man, and neither, I contend, should it end with him, even if he happens to be a pretty significant player in the overall game.