UPGRADING FROM
TERTIARY TO QUATERNARY

Quaternary Pedagogy

Toward a Quaternary level of education

The Quaternary level of understanding and expression, embracing as it does the previously undiscovered philosophy of William Shakespeare, requires a new method of teaching and learning commensurate with its unique philosophic consistency and comprehensiveness. Over the next few years, the Quaternary Institute will seek ways to impart its findings in keeping with the pedagogic standards set by its principal protagonist Shakespeare and the few other proto-Quaternary thinkers.
        Foremost in the Quaternary program are Shakespeare’s 1609 Sonnets, his 1623 Folio of thirty-six plays and his four longer poems. His works already perform a teaching/learning role as part of the curriculum in both Secondary and Tertiary education, and have done so for many years. Yet, until now, their pedagogic role as vehicles for a nature-based philosophy happens only by default.
        If Shakespeare wrote his sonnets, plays and poems to impart his nature-based philosophy, then, their use in educational institutions over the last few centuries transmits the philosophy purely by osmosis. Fortunately, despite extremely prejudicial editing and commentary that imposes by force a contrary paradigm on his works, generations of teachers and students still respond to the natural attractivity of the sonnets, plays and poems.
        Shakespeare’s works, then, are the first recourse for a Quaternary teaching program. The fourteen Comedies that lead out the plays in the 1623 Folio, demonstrate systematically how to anticipate and correct the excesses of male-based idealism. Shakespeare draws on nature as a continual resort to critique the headstrong characters exacting patriarchal prejudice on their subjects.
        In the Comedies, Shakespeare allows eleven savvy and cunning females and three gender-balanced males to take charge. In the process, he demonstrates how the characters – and the audience – can imbibe the philosophic content of a deep nature-based/female-based understanding that enables life to be contented through natural equanimity.
        Because Shakespeare intentionally publishes the Sonnets in the 1609 edition to present the compleat nature-based philosophy, of all his works the 154-sonnet set provides the best practice model for Quaternary pedagogy. He organises the 154 sonnets to represent nature and divides the set into two sequences to represent female and male. The arrangement provides a sound basis for his articulation of the relationship between human understanding and expression. The natural consistency of the principal components of the philosophy prepares the ground for the logical argument and lyrical depth within the set. The consummate effect is to ensure the most mature, fruitful and beneficial learning outcomes ever devised.
        To contextualise Shakespeare’s overarching philosophic achievement, the Quaternary program will examine the specialised philosophic contributions and pedagogic implications of the scientific writings of Charles Darwin, the anti-metaphysical investigations of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the art works of Marcel Duchamp. Of interest also are the philosophic/pedagogic consequences of Thomas Jefferson’s separation of Church and State in the Declaration of Independence and American Constitution (and evident in his design for Virginia University). It should be instructive to examine the quite distinct approaches of these proto-Quaternary minds to imparting intellectual ideas or accounting for aesthetic effects.
        In The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, Darwin manages to convey to generations of readers both the detailed evidence for evolution as well as his deeply ethical sensibility. He does so uniquely because he adheres strictly to the investigative technique known as vera causa. By extrapolating from the known facts of artificial selection in existing species to the evolutionary development over millions of years in preexisting species years through natural selection, he avoids fruitless speculation on metaphysical theories on origins, etc.
        Darwin’s combination of deep evidential content and ethical values has some correspondences with the investigative integrity of Wittgenstein’s philosophic methods. When teaching in the 1930s and 40s, Wittgenstein’s habit is to combine intense thinking about his current philosophic concerns with expostulatory statements to evince unguarded responses. His students witness Wittgenstein in the process of searching for evocative metaphors to convey his thoughts about the logic of ordinary language. His notions of language games, forms of life, and natural history prove effective in conveying the basic ethos of the way humans use language.
        The artist Duchamp demonstrates throughout his aesthetically coherent oeuvre a standard of unwavering integrity in a body of work that speaks volumes to generations of younger artists. Duchamp’s refusal to academicise his insights into the deepest level of artistic expression, the mythic, allows him to present an unrelenting picture of the workings of the aesthetic impulse at the deepest level. His continual use of puns and ellipsis aids rather than detracts from the receptivity of his basic ideas.
        In revolutionary America, Jefferson legislates to ensure none of the many religious sectarian denominations can take control of the State. Instead, by accepting the world operates according to the ‘Laws of Nature’, Jefferson recognises that all Churches share an undemocratic tendency to autocratic male-based rule best proscribed from the center of political life.
        Because the Tertiary program is doctrinairely selective about what it teaches of these proto-Quaternary thinkers, their complete body of works offer greater depths of understanding than academia permits. The Quaternary program examines the gap to see just how their works manage to convey the deep content and integrity over and above prohibitive Tertiary education methodologies.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet philosophy

This essay considers a previously unknown learning opportunity. Only in the light of Shakespeare’s Sonnet philosophy does it make sense to talk of a Quaternary pedagogy. No other thinker or system of thought offers such a consistent and comprehensive philosophy to justify instituting a completely new level of systematic education beyond Tertiary – the Quaternary.
        Not only does no one else in 400 years plumb the depth and breadth of Shakespeare’s nature-based philosophy, the failure of Tertiary scholarship to glimpse even a fraction of its natural logic means the uniqueness and depth of the sound philosophy is completely absent from the highest levels of twenty-first century education. This represents a massive systemic failure across Tertiary for a thinker/dramatist/poet of Shakespeare’s significance.
        I detail Shakespeare’s Sonnet philosophy, as evident in the 1609 edition, in the four-volume 1760-page set William Shakespeare’s Sonnet Philosophy (2005/2019). The volumes include a study of the implications of the 1609 Sonnet philosophy for all his plays and poems and an analysis of 400 years of misunderstanding by Tertiary commentators.
        There are now also three further volumes. The first is a summary volume, Shakespeare’s Global Philosophy (2017), which includes fresh insights through the consistent application of the sonnet logic over the last twelve years. The second, Shakespeare & Mature Love (2018), is a study of the mature love Shakespeare describes in the 154 sonnets and presents through select characters in his Folio of thirty-six plays. The third, Shakespeare’s Philosophy Illustrated (2019), is a pictorial volume with speech balloon commentaries on the seventy pages of the 1609 edition of the Sonnets, charts and diagram illustrating salient aspects of the philosophy and an illustrated set of comments on enigmatic artworks.
        It is not possible to appreciate the gap between Tertiary and Quaternary until those unsure of its potential consider and assimilate a substantial amount of the material already published or available on the Quaternary Institute website www.quaternaryinstitute.com. Shakespeare’s Sonnet philosophy reinstitutes the default status of singular nature over the plethora of imaginary or mind-based Goddesses and Gods. It recovers the biological default of the female as the progenitor of the male. These two simple moves alone correct at the most profound level 4000 years of imposed male-based/mind-based prejudices and Tertiary apologetics.
        Shakespeare understands that mind-based ethics and aesthetics – or truth and beauty as he calls them – derive from bodily dispositions in nature with its female/male default. His consistent and comprehensive philosophy avoids the perennial dilemmas or problems that beset traditional philosophy when it inverts and perverts the natural order.
        Across Shakespeare’s plays, there is a relentless exposé and criticism of the inevitable malconsequences male-based mythologies. Shakespeare examines the disastrous consequences of imposing mind-derived beliefs against natural prerogatives. By recognising the erotic logic of all myths he reveals their status as mind-based stories. Moreover, by recovering the default biology of female partnership with the offshoot male, he writes plays at a mythic level of expression without the imaginary delusions of traditional male-based mythologies.
        The Nature template I derive from the 154 sonnets lays out the basic components of Shakespeare’s philosophy. Shakespeare builds up his consistent and comprehensive logic, which accounts for all possibilities out of the readily observable givens enabling human life in nature.

        Nature is the only generic word in everyday use without plural and without supplementary definition. All humans derive from the sexual dynamic of female and male in nature and all are the consequence of the dynamic of increase or reproduction. Each human being is conscious of incoming sensations and uses language based on the dynamic of true and false to communicate.
        More significantly, for understanding the human imagination, every person experiences the internal sensations of the mind in the form of intuitions, love, religious experience or artistic inspiration. Shakespeare, above all other profound thinkers and poets, is equally conscious he conveys his thoughts and emotions through the medium of poetry.
        Shakespeare demonstrates that by adhering to the facts of human life and the natural dispositions of sense and intellect, he is able to account logically for every aspect of human life. Moreover, as the interest in his works over the last 400 years shows, he is able to write the most integrated, engaging and challenging poetry and drama ever penned.

The institution of Tertiary

The Quaternary level of mature education presupposes the continuing viability of the three current levels of age-related learning. The institutionalisation of Primary, Secondary and Tertiary stages of instruction ensures consistent standards of achievement.
        Historically, Primary education equates to pre-scribal societies from before 4000 years ago where learning was largely oral. The aim of compulsory Primary education is to teach literacy, numeracy and writing to all pupils. It also begins to establish the basis for developing skills in science, mathematics, geography, history and the social sciences.
        Secondary equates to scribal cultures in which writing using linear script is adopted universally and the developments presaged in Primary become a wide-ranging curriculum. However, only over the last sixty years or so has Secondary become mandatory in most countries.
        Tertiary, for its part, was once the preserve of the few who matriculated from Secondary to advance academically. Now, like Secondary before it, Tertiary is becoming mandatory for most vocational opportunities.
        Tertiary education was instituted formally around 1100AD in Bologna and Paris. The move coincided with renewed interest in classical Greek culture after the cloistering of knowledge during the medieval period or dark ages. Since Tertiary’s inception under the auspices of the Catholic Church, it remains predicated on the biblical male-based paradigm.

Shakespeare’s nature-based philosophy as the default for Primary, Secondary and Tertiary

Shakespeare’s works are an established mainstay of the educational curriculum and are often compulsory for Secondary and Tertiary examination across jurisdictions (as in Britain and the Commonwealth). Largely by default, for teachers and educators they provide the nature-based paradigm that underpins all forms of education at all levels.
        Shakespeare’s works are mandatory in many Secondary schools as pupils develop their rational and creative potentials. Although Shakespeare may be introduced in Primary using texts such as the Charles and Mary Lamb’s incredibly facile Tales from Shakespeare and other Shakespeare made simple books, by the time they reach Secondary students are ready to engage with the plays, even directing and staging their own productions. Greater specialisation in Tertiary with more vocation-based courses means not all students study Shakespeare – even those doing humanities courses.
        Criminally, though, there is an insidious corruption of the texts used in Secondary and Tertiary through the prejudicial culture of paradigm conversion typical of most Tertiary English departments and endemic at the Stratford Institute at Stratford Upon Avon. Hence, the downside of compulsory Shakespeare in Secondary is that students use texts with emendations, reattributions, authorship issues, etc., in which the interference reflects the determined conversion of Shakespeare’s works to the prevailing biblical male-based Tertiary paradigm.
        Worse even, are the commentaries provided by the offending academics to justify the unwarranted changes. Students who are provided with Oxford, Cambridge and other Tertiary series featuring commentaries on all the plays unwittingly read the introductory material in which Shakespeare’s role in providing the underlying nature-based paradigm is undermined by a prejudiced and supposedly authoritative commentary that converts his work by a thousand cuts to the Tertiary paradigm.
        Only when students recognise the 1609 edition of the Sonnets as authorial is it possible to begin to appreciate they were intentionally published by Shakespeare to present the philosophy behind all his plays and poems. Consequently, only when students recognise the 1623 Folio as authorial, can the process of enlivening the study of all Shakespeare’s works begin.
        Each play is a pedagogical device deployed specifically by Shakespeare to disseminate his nature-based female-default philosophy. The 1623 Folio is arranged to emphasise the pedagogical potential of the successful application of the philosophy in the fourteen Comedies and the disastrous consequences of the abrogation of nature-based logic in the ten Histories and twelve Tragedies.
        If students in Secondary – and Tertiary – are made aware of Shakespeare’s manifest intentions, then the role of the academic interference can be revealed for the literary crime it is. Currently, because so many in positions of authority in Tertiary are responsible for the literary crimes, the necessary tactic is to institute another level of learning – the Quaternary – in which the ideas can be fostered in a climate conducive to the nature-based philosophy of Shakespeare’s works.

Conclusion, the relationship between Tertiary and Quaternary

The need for a Quaternary level of education arises not because of a concern about the state of Tertiary pedagogy. The opposite is the case. After years of study of thinkers considered problematic in Tertiary, I happened on a philosophy completely unknown within Tertiary yet overarching its philosophical paradigm and hence all the philosophers of the last 4000 years or so. The insights not only explain the difficulty posed forTertiary by those apparently problematic thinkers, it shows that their specialized contributions could be combined to approximate the consistency and comprehensiveness of the newfound philosophy.
        With a systematic philosophy of considerable explanatory power available, it soon became apparent not only is it unknown in Tertiary, the Tertiary paradigm is constitutionally too limited to accommodate it. It is necessary, though, to pass through Tertiary pedagogy to begin to access, appreciate and apply the Quaternary philosophy. Hence in 2000, I created a new pedagogic space called Quaternary to explore and prepare the findings for advanced investigation, learning and expression.
        The idea William Shakespeare’s works are based on a sound and substantive philosophy has long been mooted. Many books and articles have been written either attempting to delineate the philosophy behind all his works or aligning his thinking with traditional or modern schools of philosophy. Both approaches are stymied by adherence in some degree to the founding Tertiary male-based biblical/Platonic paradigm.
        The difficulty for Tertiary is in the level of intellectuality and artistry required to broach Shakespeare’s brilliant nature-based philosophy written intentionally for a burgeoning global constituency. He knew he was preparing for an age beyond the inconsistencies and injustices in the floundering Tertiary paradigm.
        It is necessary to realise Shakespeare intentionally articulated his nature-based philosophy in the 1609 Sonnets as the philosophy behind all his plays and that it is only possible to appreciate the philosophy by bringing together the specialised insights of post-Tertiary thinkers like Darwin, Wittgenstein, Mallarme, Duchamp, Jefferson (as I did over the period 1970 to 1995). Only then does the brilliant nature-based philosophy structured precisely into the Sonnets become patently clear and applicable.
        Shakespeare’s Sonnet philosophy is the only philosophy ever written capable of justifying the establishment of a Quaternary level of learning wholly beyond current Tertiary education. As with a Secondary student approaching Tertiary for the first time, any Tertiary graduate of whatever station from BA to the most decorated professor faces a quantum jump in expectations and intellectual demands.
        The transition from Tertiary to Quaternary is entirely voluntary as befits a mature level of study. The demands of the Quaternary program self-select those most capable or most willing to move from a circumscribed mind-based pedagogy to a global nature-based pedagogy.

Upgrading from Tertiary to Quaternary

Resources for information and advancement

In 2000, I inaugurated the Quaternary Institute to accommodate a fully post-Tertiary level of inquiry and education. The initiative followed the discovery in 1995 of the consistent and comprehensive nature-based philosophy William Shakespeare embeds in his 1609 Sonnets as the basis for his 1623 Folio of thirty-six plays and his four longer poems.
        Now in 2023, the Quaternary Institute can consolidate the process of superseding the apologetic inadequacies of the Tertiary paradigm. As no one has previously plumbed the Sonnet philosophy, and as Shakespeare’s plays and poems can be understood only from the vantage of the philosophy he articulates in his set of 154 sonnets, then the Quaternary Institute is uniquely placed to offer pedagogic resources to supersede Tertiary limitations.

A Quaternary paradigm for a nature-orientated global constituency

My ability to apprehend the depth and breadth of Shakespearean thought came after years studying the difficulties presented by a few seminal thinkers whose works are not fully conformable with the Tertiary paradigm (see below). Moreover, the unprecedented explanatory power of Shakespeare’s Sonnet philosophy means it supersedes all other attempts over time to articulate a sound and inclusive philosophy.
        Shakespeare’s nature-based philosophy demonstrates that all other so-called philosophies are forms of psychological justification or apologetics for the biblical/Platonic (or similar) paradigms. In particular, biblical/Christian mythology underpins the psychological apologia for Tertiary from around 1100AD to the present day.
        In keeping with Shakespeare’s reputation as a nature Poet and the longstanding recognition he bases his works in nature, his Sonnet philosophy takes nature as the unconditional given for all else. Because in everyday language we use the word nature without plural or other provisos, we accept involuntarily nature’s status as the singular precondition for everything. In contrast, the words God, universe, world, etc., all have plural forms, or we legislate them into usurpatious singularity over nature.
        Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, as he organises them in the edition of 1609, adhere unerringly to natural prerogatives. The whole set of 154 sonnets represents singular nature, while the two sequences of 126 and 28 sonnets within the set represent the male and the female, respectively.
        Consistent with the natural preconditions, Shakespeare’s philosophy recognises the female as the default for the male. In the biology of sexual dimorphism, the male is an offshoot of the female. As sonnet 20 avers, in ‘nature’ the male is ‘created’ for the female. The male needs to return to the female for the perpetuation of humankind or what sonnets 1 to 14 call ‘increase’. The increase argument is not that everyone should increase. Rather that if no one increases, as inferred in some male-based beliefs, humankind ceases to exist.
        With these three moves – the singularity of nature, the default of female over male and the intractable logic of increase – Shakespeare incorporates a natural basis for a sound philosophy while critiquing simultaneously all other inconsistent mind-based and male-based philosophies before or since. Unless thinkers acknowledge the natural givens, their philosophising is but psychological justification or apologetics.
        Once Shakespeare lays out the incontrovertible givens of nature and the female/male default and the implications of increase, he can then articulate the natural logic of the human mind. First, he accounts for incoming sensations whose singular unmediated effects on the mind he calls ‘beauty’ (sonnets 128 to 137). Then, consequent on incoming sensations within the mind is the swearing and forswearing of true and false that constitutes intelligible language or ‘truth’ (sonnets 138 to 152).
        Then, throughout the male sequence (sonnets 20 to 126), Shakespeare accounts for the mind-derived sensations we refer to as intuitions, ideals, or the sublime (including the epiphanous mind sensation called God). We experience them as singular unmediated sensations – which Shakespeare appropriately also calls ‘beauty’.
        Shakespeare devotes the majority of the sonnets to this form of beauty, which we give expression to in the arts. He appreciates that these unbidden sensations, generated purely in the mind as a consequence of external sensations inducing language, are a psychological quagmire for susceptible or immature thinkers and poets.
        The Nature template shows the logical relationships within the 154 sonnets.

        Holding to these natural preconditions, Shakespeare is then able to account for all other characteristics of the mind. Among other issues, he examines the function of writing and particularly the role of the Poet in the set (sonnets 15 to 19), the construct of time, the erotic logic of myths of origin and the relation between natural ‘content’ and ‘contentedness’. In his Folio of plays, he applies the insights of natural philosophy to rectify the social, political and religious malconsequences of male-based constructs, such as the Commandments of the Mosaic God with their constitutional usurpation of the female’s natural default over the male.
        Furthermore, Shakespeare’s use of the word ‘globe’ in his plays (along with the naming of the Globe Theatre in 1598) indicates he was aware his nature-based philosophy, with its genuine mythic level of artistic expression, provides a coherent and inclusive philosophy for a burgeoning global awareness. Shakespeare’s increasing popularity over the last fifty years means the recent discovery of the Sonnet philosophy, as the basis for his Folio of plays, is timely for the twenty-first century with its nature-orientated global constituency.

Reflections on the inadequacy of the historic Tertiary paradigm

The inability of Tertiary scholarship worldwide to penetrate the Sonnet philosophy over the last 400 years, combined with the forcible conversion and prejudicial adulteration of Shakespeare’s sonnets, plays and poems through editing, emendation and reattribution by academics and others since 1700, points to a grievous inadequacy in the Tertiary paradigm.
        An anecdotal measure of the chasm is evident in the entry on Wittgenstein in the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1996). The Dictionary makes two crucial observations. First, it doubts whether Wittgenstein’s ‘thought will ever be fully integrated into academic philosophy’. Second, it notes that by advocating ‘a naturalism’ or a ‘kind of natural human practice’ Wittgenstein avoids both absolutism and relativism.
        However, despite referring to ‘nature’ and ‘parents’ as unassailable givens from the period of the Philosophical Investigations to his final notes in On Certainty, Wittgenstein does not elaborate a systematic philosophy based in ‘naturalism’. Nor does the entry expand critically on the relation between Wittgenstein’s ‘naturalism’ and ‘academic philosophy’. Instead, it devotes considerable collegial energy to thinkers such as Foucault and Heidegger, whose academic philosophising is conformable with Tertiary prerogatives.
        I identify two other thinkers whose work, like Wittgenstein’s, is not integrated fully into Tertiary. Most academics ignore Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man as the basis for understanding the ‘mental powers’ and ‘moral sense’ of humankind. Rather, like Richard Dawkins, they use Darwin’s study of precognitive sensibilities in Origin of Species to account for the human mind and ethics. Academia similarly does not accommodate the mythic critique and content of Marcel Duchamp’s seminal art works The Large Glass and Etant donnes. It prefers to derive simplistic formalistic devices from his readymades.
        The doubts raised within Tertiary as to whether academic philosophy will ever fully integrate Wittgenstein’s thought is true also of Darwin and Duchamp. Yet, significantly, the aspects of their works currently outside the purview of academia are not subject to denigration and reattribution. While some academics acknowledge the presence of the difficult content, the limited forays by the three thinkers beyond Tertiary precepts makes it possible to ignore their unsystematic insights.
        The same cannot be said of Shakespeare. The complete blindness of Tertiary scholarship to Shakespeare’s Sonnet philosophy over 400 years has led in part to the postmodern malaise and the literary crimes endemic in academia of willful reconfiguration, reattribution or rewriting of Shakespeare’s works. Only Shakespeare’s complete works are subject to such presumptuous and demeaning treatment.
        Although many sense philosophic depths in Shakespeare works, none are sufficiently free of Tertiary proscriptions to appreciate the uncanny scope and incisiveness of Shakespeare’s thought and emotions. Bertrand Russell quotes from Shakespeare’s works numerous times in his A History of Western Philosophy (1946). Yet, while he gives many lesser thinkers/poets such as Byron a chapter, Shakespeare does not qualify for one. Significantly, Shakespeare does not rate one mention in the Cambridge Dictionary or the Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995).

Working to remedy the pedagogical deficiencies within Tertiary

Over the last twenty-five years, I have investigated exhaustively Shakespeare’s nature-based philosophy and its implications. I present extensive evidence and argument in the four-volume 1760-page publication William Shakespeare’s Sonnet Philosophy (2005), in four further publications, in correspondence and in postings on the Quaternary Institute website (see below).
        Available now is a 360-page summary volume Shakespeare’s Global Philosophy (published 2017), a 100-page monograph Shakespeare & Mature Love (published 2018) on mature Shakespearean love and an A4 90-page teaching-aid volume Shakespeare’s Philosophy Illustrated (published 2019) of charts and diagrams. Published in 2022, is a Super A3 924-page 800,000-word volume of speech balloon commentaries on the text of the 1623 Folio of plays titled Play Commentaries to William Shakespeare's 1623 Folio with all pages available on the Quaternary Institute website. (The last two are also digitalised for data-show screening.)
        The conclusion is that only Shakespeare’s ‘naturalism’, which he lays out in the Sonnet philosophy, has the required degree of consistency and comprehensiveness to initiate a new level of systematic education free of the Tertiary dichotomy between absolutism and relativism. The combination of the nature-based philosophy Shakespeare articulates in the 154 sonnets and his exploration of its political, social and religious ramifications in the thirty-six plays in the Folio and the four longer poems provide the basis for a curriculum that stands entirely beyond current Tertiary strictures and confusion.
        Having largely completed the process of investigation into the previously unknown philosophy, I am now developing the material for a Quaternary level of advanced pedagogy. Tertiary’s paradigmatic blindness to Shakespeare’s philosophy means only a completely new level of education will suffice.
        Interested institutions can subscribe to a course of instruction for selected professors and others to begin the process of transitioning from the postmodern malaise into a globally relevant and encompassing natural human practice.