Not since Plato, and earlier than him the Indic Traditions, has the problem of “delay” been an academic concern, much less a philosophical one. For this “delay” is responsible for the “shadow” on which, and in which all of Western Philosophy has rested since Aristotle moved the center of knowledge from the heart to the head. Technically this “delay” is responsible for the simulacrum upon which Philosophy has been making its claims, the four final causes of Aristotle, the universals of the Medievals, the “cogito” of Descartes, the tabula rasa of Locke, the associated­matrix of Hume, the passive, reinforcement­driven animal of Skinner, the genetically hard­wired robot of the sociobiologists, the distinctions between necessary and contingent truths of the analysts., the “epoche” of the self of the phenomenologists and so on. Philosophy, according to Appelbaum, is a house built on sand, a discentered center, and regardless of how much we try to dig deeper into philosophy the result is the same, we move and are conditioned by and in the “shadow”, in the space that “is” the “delay” between the “knowledge” of the heart and the “knowledge” of the head. Within this “delay” rests all of Philosophy, since Aristotle started the trend, all of our ethics, and our interiorized habits of individual, “subjective” atonement.

A book making such claims, and written in the initiatory prose of Appelbaum should be a first priority to the legions of philosophers and their students grounding their “doing” of philosophy on a lie, on a false claim to knowledge, on creating a habit of judgement without really knowing enough to be able to make decisions based on that knowledge.

Appelbaum’s book is not only daring and original but unless it is implemented in Academia, what we know today as the discipline of Philosophy and philosophy courses will cease to exist as a joyful discipline, as a sensitizing practice, as a relevant profession, even as a profession, and become as extinct as the profession of philosophy made the Greek mysteries extinct.

On the other hand, a revolutionary book, like the present one, no matter how original, will most probably be ignored, passed over as an anachronism, a victim to the tyranny of the majority not ready or able to change its habits of mind, or develop new habits of heart in the absence of one, or led by the habit of “delay” of its knowledge. Hence the need to shout it in the market place.

THE DELAY OF THE HEART.
This book is the third installment of the trilogy Appelbaum started with The Stop and Disruption (SUNY Press) under the theme of “the intervening subject.” But where in the other two earlier books the reader might have been left with a sense of a gigantic invasion on his/her personal habits of reading, not knowing clearly where the author was moving to, in the present volume the space of discourse is clearly demarcated. And this space is: the “delay” that occurs when shifting “knowledge” from the heart to the head.

The book divides into twelve chapters. Starting with the Heart’s Delay, where writer and reader meet and are expected to react to each other were it not for the fact that the “delay” makes the reaction impossible and makes the meeting a reinforcement of the “delay”. The author then moves to the role in the “delay” of memory, of the missing embodiment, to the possible corrective through Initiation, to the discrepancy in the task, to the search for the path, to the different schools, to the personal guide, to the resurrection of the flesh, to the conscience of this resurrection, to the hope to finish the trip, and ironically, the author ends not with a shout of triumph but with the damnation of the subject forced to turn his life into an atonement due to the “delay.”

The author writes on page 2-3: ” The heart is in delay because thought is always in advance of itself. From a stand point of a neutral observer who watches the proceedings, delay is neither factual nor non existent. Its existence is a contingency that arises in the relation between the parties involved. It is a contingency asking to be annihilated, whose annihilation is an inevitability that results in more delay. This is the view from the heart.”

” The functional beat of thinking makes for a constant theme common to all thinking, a kind of underground drone. Thought thinks about being ahead of itself (and therefore lagging behind) or about being behind itself (and therefore catching up.)”

” The delay through which the heart speaks is buried beneath the time of the world…” And it is in this world of time that thought meets thought and also the “other”, other than thought:

“Could the unstable posture be called embodiment?… sensitivity is included.” p.13.

IT IS THIS SENSITIVITY THAT BRINGS IN MEMORY.

” The task of thought is to comprehend the delay of the heart with the understanding of obedience… The task, surprisingly presents itself as a task of memory… a mindfulness of the delay of higher-order intelligence as it makes its way to thought.” p.15

AND IT IS MEMORY THAT BRINGS IN THE BODY against the closure of the body’s interruption of thought. But this body will forever remain silent unless an ethical effort is performed to turn a potency into an actuality. Embodiment requires effort against the delay.

“If the ethical concerns the task of memory and is meant to complete our fragmentary subjectivity, what is required of us?” p. 39

Not the ethical, as a theory to obey, but rather, “Initiation (as) the force of the ethical brought to bear at an appropriate point.” p.41

And this initiation is the same as an “entitlement waiting patiently in anarchic time for the subject to claim it…and after claiming it, no longer possesses it. The meaning of being chosen has little to do with title and privilege. To bear memory of the immemorial and to comprehend the heart’s delay is to participate in an inner, reverse movement of the world, that which opposes the direction of entropy.” p.51

The choice of discrepancy is the first obstacle of the initiate. Can one, in the habit of the delay of the heart, listen to it?

“Alone, cast unto a foreign shore, the one who speaks is called to uniqueness by a uniqueness… When the same is no longer represented by a biographical, biological, cultural or psychological property, anxiety over the question of subjectivity intensifies. No disclosure regarding the self allays it because disclosure is reducible to substitution… ” p.59

For the first time the subject is faced with the responsibility of subjectivity. Not to adhere to this responsibility is to fall in the hands of justice:

” The justice of irresponsibility is swift. Its ethics of desperation, isolation, and finitude provides just retribution. No other justice, even God’s, could be harsher.” p. 64

So much effort for so much mortality. Is there a way back to the immortal heart, to the immortal?

There is a possible yes as an answer. There is the language of return, the secret language the gods use in the descent to the underworld to rescue Eurydice, or the language of return of the sinner to his God. The way back is neither clear nor straight:

” Inward travel, cannot afford luxuries of straightness and ease. In proximity there is a groping in opacity… the itinerary is a series of stabs, thrusts, back steps, leaps, pirouettes, somersaults, arabesques, turnabouts, and still poses. It meanders and wanders, devious and evasive, following neither rule nor regulation. Not guided by the rectitude of thought movement in proximity depends on a sensitivity to another influence, influence of the other. ” p.67

For the first time now, the subject on its way back to the origin, on its return discovers that “memory of the immemorial is intersubjective, and that this belongs to no subject, but rather the subjects belong to it… To regain a sense of belonging, the subject must relinquish a memory that is personal.” p. 86

It is now that the initiate looks for a guide. “Between guiding and being guided, the middle voice of a forgotten inflection speaks of seeking guidance. Without hidden opposition, no exchange occurs between the one and the other.” p.99

And it is now that “subjectivity presses against the skin from the inside… The suspended animation of desire is precisely the flesh ” given up for dead.” When objects cease to rally thought for irritability to instrument the body, action is possible in a way that was before impossible. The act has subjectivity itself as subject… and enjoins the subject to remember itself. Only through the task of memory can a work of completing the incomplete, the other’s and the subject’s own, be engaged, fructified and accomplished.” pp 103 and 111.

But where can the subject find this disclosure? Can the heart talk?

“The secret of the heart’s delay, which is the secret of death, cannot be disclosed. Disclosure belongs to a temporality sympathetic with thought’s functional beat… If there is a “victory over death,” it lies in the memory of the immemorial and the subject’s success in meeting Death’s sister Lethe (forgetfulness). To remember oneself even unto death is to immunize a portion of one’s life against that final sickness… as we can recall from Horace’s claim:

Some part of me will live and not be given

Over into the hands of the death goddess.” p.123

Are we then on the threshold of immortality? Hardly… We must first be open to hope.

” Hope (appears)… in a rapprochement with somatic intelligence (that) differentiates it from mere expectancy.” And for glorious event to take place, “knowledge of the heart (must) rise as a phoenix from the collapse of cognition… This collapse of cognition, the aneurysm of thought’s functional beat, is however, not self-willed…” p. 125. And this because: ” Thought is hopeless, despairing of ruin and decay. Indeed. Thought has just enough attentiveness to witness its degeneration over time… One is forced to adopt either a messianic vision (that transcendence will come with the proper emissary) or an idealism (that one is already transcendent).” p.135

AND THUS WE ARE FORCED TO BE IN THE COMPANY OF THE ONLY TEMPORARY OUTCOME OF THE DELAY: ATONEMENT.

“In exile the only real problem is atonement. For the one who has separated from the other, expiation is the only real matter of concern. .. Without atonement, the exiled state establishes itself all the more firmly… Without atonement, exile grows bitter and instead of being localized as a singular theme becomes the thematic of thought, becomes thought itself..” p.137. Subjectivity, therefore, must have a second birth, be born again. ” One is born because one has already been born. Or else, one can never be born.”

In summary: ” In the heart’s delay, in its surpassing quality, is contained the secret of death and of birth. In the schism it opens between memory and the immemorial, the automatism and proximity, and freedom and responsibility, delay tries me and finds me wanting in response. For this lack, I atone. Ever deepening pulses of expiation fail to close the gap… Or if it does, I have ceased to be a servant of the other and instead have become a lackey. I have ceased to be tried and instead have been found to have failed.” p. 147

Recent studies in neurobiology have radically changed our cerebral map and the way we know as opposed to how we thought we knew with Aristotle, the Medievals, and Descartes. Neuroscience has confirmed a new paradigm that repeats step by step the philosophic method of Plato. M. Colavito (1995) has put together a new paradigm, called by the discoverer “biocultural.” Biocultural means that biology and culture act on one another in such a way that one does not develop without the other. Through this interaction culture becomes biology and biology culture. To know becomes health or, in its absence, illness or crisis. Thus the need for Philosophy. Culture acts and stimulates biology, namely, the neural passages of our brains, giving thus rise to the enormous variety of brains around us and the sporadic unity and diversity of cultures. Cultures and brains may be distinguished from one another by the use of certain functions, technologies, or combination of certain functions that we use habitually. Our habits, are literally, mental habits put into action by a particular brain, formed by those same habits. We, as individuals, are defined by a primary ” pilot brain” and this brain determines for us not only our knowledge but also our health. Briefly, by age 11 we each one of us has three primary brains, intelligence centers: he reptilian-kinesthetic, the limbic-auditive, and the visual-mimetic of the right hemisphere of the neocortex. At this age other two brains have started forming in the left hemisphere of the neocortex, the left brain-mimetic, symbolic, conceptual and the logo-digital known as the “interpreter module.” Human crisis starts primarily in the first three brains, at an early age, for their development depends entirely on the quality of their nurture. If, for any reason, these brains are not exercised (nurtured) they are canceled. On the other hand the other brains of the left hemisphere together with the “frontal lobes”– our centers of memory, attention, language, creativity, planning, strategies, self-conscience, and decision making– keep on growing and developing with us. It is this new cerebral map that has dramatic consequences for us as both philosophers and also humans who suffer.

Neither reason nor mind are one, as Philosophy has presupposed since Aristotle passing through Descartes, but on the contrary our intelligence systems are five as Plato showed us: the kinesthetic, limbic, the visual mimetic of the right hemisphere, the conceptual mimetic of the left hemisphere and the digital nominalist of the “interpreter module,” as Gazzaniga named (1978). The first three primary intelligence centers receive information, coming from the outside-inside directly. The other two brains of the left hemisphere receive all information from the right hemisphere or from its own systems of substitution, like a logic. The worst part of the deal is that these two intelligence systems of the left hemisphere of the neocortex are two systems of “translation” not of reception. They do not access the world directly, but only through the right brains. Nor is location of the brains essential in the description of their activities, for the left brains are capable only of separating the trees in front of them without certain knowledge as to which forest these trees belong to. Hence ideology. They are the ground of the “delay,” a mechanism inherent in the act of perception itself. (Comfort 1979, de Nicolas 1980) They are the base of ideologies, be they religious or scientific, or philosophical. The worst part of this picture and with greater consequences is that when one of these two left brain systems are activated as “reason” they either scramble the other systems, or cancel them or destroy them and the bodies behind the brains. When a cognitive system is in action, the other systems neither can act nor have any other option than to wait until the acting brain takes a break. Thinking done based on the “delay” is not a neutral act, it creates habits and affects the whole human ecology.

Do we still have time to educate now that the University, in the wake of a long “delay” of the knowledge of the heart, has become a vocational center imparting mortality only to its young members? Well, as long as we remember Plato and Pythagoras and the Indic texts, or people like. Appelbaum write to make us re-member what they did there is still hope, and may be task of atonement is simply the dis-membering of the “delay.” May be Appelbaum should think of giving us a fourth book just dis-membering the “delay,” forcing us thus to re-member the heart.

Categories: Philosophical