Marten Kuilman (1947) studied geology at the Free University of Amsterdam. Exploration activities brought him to places like South Africa, Zimbabwe (former Rhodesia), Ireland and Australia, searching minerals like coal, tin, lead, zinc and gold. The stay in the various countries was intermitted by long car journeys, notably around the Mediterranean (1971), through the Sahara (1972) and to India (1976). The tradition of the ‘Olympic’ years continued with travels to the West Coast of America (1980), Egypt and Israel (1984), Mexico and Guatemala (1988), Indonesia (1992), Peru and Bolivia (in 1996) and Costa Rica (2000). The main reason for those excursions, and the ones which followed, was the deep-seated intention ‘to see the world’ and to put our position as a privileged observer into perspective.
The study of the manifestation of the four-fold was the result of a personal journey, embarked on after the search for the material gold came to an end. ‘The Tarpeian Rock’ (1982) was the title of the first autobiographical expression. It was the traitor’s death by being flung from the Tarpeian rock in Rome that was relived in the description of a career (and its end) with a multinational oil company. The departure of the physical investigation of the earth led to transcendental horizons with unknown treasures.
The early exploratory writings resulted in an (unpublished) book titled ‘Van God Los’ (1984). The first recorded occurrence (of the term ‘quadralism’) was in a notebook called ‘Scrapnel 2’. The date was the 31st of March 1984. The word, with an exclamation mark, referred to the four aspects of nature in Joannes Scotus Eriugena’s book ‘De Divisione Naturae’ (or Periphyseon). This manuscript, written in the ninth century, is – in many aspects – still the most notable contribution to the fourfold way of thinking. It was this book, which put the author on the trail of four-fold thinking and the subsequent development of a quadralectic epistemology.
A further inquiry into thought models and the possibilities of analogy (in comparison with the Egyptian and Greek cultural history) opened up an understanding of division-thinking-in-general. The next (unpublished) book, the ‘Isagoge’ (1986), was an ‘introduction to a quadralectic philosophy’. It came closer to the meaning of quadralectics although the ‘yoke of oppositional thinking’ had not been complete been thrown off.
The concept of quadralectic thinking took shape in the next few years and resulted in a ‘Textbook on Quadralectics’ in 1990, mastering the subject on a theoretical and practical level. The seven-hundred-plus pages of the book contained the first comprehensive description of the basic principles, comparisons, applications and predictions possible in quadralectic thinking. A computer program was written (by Cavesoft/H.D. Kuilman) to calculate the nature of any conceivable size of visibility.
The ‘Textbook’ was immediately after its completion reworked. Firstly, in a more sizeable form in the ‘The Keyhole of the Pantheon’ (1990) and secondly in an extended form (but with the majority of the speculative items left out) in ‘The Gardens of Epicurus’ (1991). Further extensive research on the expressions of the four-division resulted in another large work, called ‘Four. The Rediscovery of the Tetragonus Mundus’ (1995/1996). None of these books have been published so far.
The present book combines the theoretical aspects of a quadralectic approach with its (speculative) consequences. The implementation in a historical context leads to new vistas, which have never been seen before.
Heemstede, 26-10-2011
Visions of Four Notions 