Yoga Philosophy, Part 1

After twenty years of research in and on the European and Indian traditions of philosophy, peer reviewed publications in and on both traditions, translating the Yoga Sūtra (Penguin 2008) and other works of Indian philosophy, and after waking up one day to realize that I have had a lot of practice teaching at Canada’s third largest university (3000 students and counting) I started Yoga Philosophy to share free, research-based information about yoga and philosophy to all who sign up. My goal is to send out, every week, information on yoga (discipline, meditation) and philosophy for interested scholars, practitioners and students of philosophy and yoga.

There are four reasons that philosophers should be interested in Yoga. First, Yoga, the philosophy, while distinct from the commercialized practice of yoga (typically a curated series of postural exercises), nevertheless plays a role in the conceptualization and justification of such practices and thus represents one means by which the general public, outside of academia, engages with philosophy.

Secondly, Yoga represents an extremely influential non-western philosophical contribution to the global heritage of philosophy. The Yoga Sūtra (2nd century CE), the systematic articulation of the philosophy of Yoga, may be the most widely read and translated text of philosophy the world over, in so far as it constitutes the basic philosophical manual of the practice of yoga. 

Third, Yoga, the philosophy, that we learn about from Patañjali, which is a basic moral theory, in contrast to virtue ethics, consequentialism and deontology, has been extremely influential in the Indian tradition and globally in the form of Gandhi’s (and by extension Martin Luther King’s) project of direct action as a politics of radical inclusion aimed at bringing about individual and political autonomy (kaivalya in Sanskrit) en masse (Ranganathan 2019). Recent movements of direct action that endorse a wide account of moral standing, including animals and the Earth, have their (underappreciated) intellectual roots in Yoga, which entails both a wide approach to moral standing and direct action as a mode of political engagement. (Yoga Sūtra  II.33-35)

Fourth, and importantly, the practice as set out in Yoga is indispensable to scholarship in philosophy, and failures to engage philosophy yogically results in irrationality and the creation of an Orientalist literature. This literature further undermines the appeal of philosophy to a diverse audience, who encounter the Orientalism of the literature as a reason to stay out of philosophy.  As we philosophers strive to show the relevance of philosophy to a wider diverse world, while being reasonable, we ignore Yoga at our peril.    

In the next section, I provide an overview of Yoga; in the third section, I talk about how it is vitally relevant to problems of twentieth century Analytic and Continental philosophy. In the next post in this two-part article on Yoga philosophy, I tackle the question of religion and its relationship to yoga and provide a brief summary.

What is Yoga?

Most folks learn about yoga, in a Westernized world (including contemporary, post colonized India), via public figures who present it as a series of postures (āsana) and breathing exercises (prāṇāyāma). Historians of yoga point out that though these practices are often depicted as ancient, for the most part they go back to a very influential innovator, T. Krishnamacharya, at the turn of the twentieth century, who started developing a formula for physical education that blended the recent European fad of physical fitness with a traditional practice of haṭha (force) yoga practice (Singleton 2010). Postural practice predates Krishnamacharya but it is worth noting that Krishnamacharya’s work constitutes most people’s awareness of yoga these days.

What I have learned through my years of research is that historians are often not in the best position to talk about the history of yoga, for much of it is philosophical. Hence, one must be a historian of philosophy (which is to say, a philosopher-proper) to understand its history. The history of yoga is logical, not psychological or sociological as it is itself a contribution to philosophical debate, and it is an explicit criticism of psychologism and tradition.

“Yoga” has more than one function in the Indian tradition. It is the generic term for meditation, and disciplinary practice. Yoga so understood is ancient, finding mention in the Vedas. The first articulation of Yoga philosophy is to be found in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad (I.1-3) (a latter part of the Vedas) where we find the god Death explaining to the boy Nachiketa yoga via the analogy of the chariot: the body is like the chariot in which the self resides, the sense the horses, the intellect the charioteer, and the mind the reigns — all have to function as a unity in service of the interests of the self. This is his answer to Nachiketa’s question: what happens after one dies. Death’s answer is that death, the loss of control over one’s life, is something we have to face no matter what. If we lose autonomy in ourselves, we self-control and avoid public disaster. This is Yoga. If we do not lose control to ourselves via self-control, we do not regulate our relationship to other items in a public world and thereby meet with death (the loss of control) as a misfortune that happens to us. This philosophy of self-control as a means of public participation ends up being an enduringly influential thread in Indian philosophy, and shows up in traditions such as Buddhism that deny the substantial reality of the self.

A common straw man argument against the Yoga tradition issues from the no-self camp. They point out (prior to Hume by over a millennia) that if we are to inspect reality and our mind, we never find the ‘self’: we only find thoughts and feelings, and hence the self is dispensable to an account of our lives (see for instance Questions of King Milinda). The Yoga view is not tied to the idea that the self is something we experience. It is rather committed to the self as a procedural abstraction of our own life–an abstraction we invoke when we are pressed with moral questions that require us to take stock of choices. (This is a point nicely made by Death’s analogy of the chariot.) Each one of us as a real procedural abstraction of our own life reveals to us our own life in a moral dimension where we have to take stock of our choices and have to face Death’s inevitability as something we either take control of or have happen to us. This is a point brought out by the symbolism of Death, called “Yama” (also the name for the first of the ancillary practices of Yoga, Yoga Sūtra  I.29-30, which consists in political values geared toward respecting personal boundaries of ourselves and others in a public world) who later in the tradition is often called Dharma Raja–the King of Ethics.

Drawing on these ideas of yoga (especially the identification of the self as a procedural abstraction responsible for coordinating various aspects of its own life), we find “Yoga” systematically articulated for the first time in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra (2nd CE). If I were to generalize, Indic philosophies of yoga (meditation) in the broad sense—which includes Buddhist philosophies, for instance—draw a distinction between the facts and what is reasonable, noting that many facts of the world are a product of pathological choices and are in this sense unreasonable.

On Patañjali’s account, we have two explanatory resources at our disposal to account for phenomena. The first is nature: this is the realm of causality. Mind and psychology are reducible to natural causes. The second is persons: this is the realm of personal responsibility. The first variety of explanation is causal, and the latter is normative. Yoga, as we find it in Patañjali, begins by further drawing a distinction between thinking (responsibly controlling our relationship to mental content which is nothing but the contents of the public world) and adopting propositional attitudes (identifying with experiences via attitudes).

The problem with identifying with experiences and mental content is that it tags us on to the realm of natural explanation, and this undermines our personal freedom. We are thereby a function of the psychological and natural causes and not choice. Disengaging from mental phenomena on Patañjali’s account comes about not by trying to fight experiences, but by taking a deflationary, externalist approach to mental content, as at best a contingent depiction of how things are from some perspective. But then, we take responsibility for mental content (the external world), as something that we relate to as agents, and we no longer treat it as a representation. As something we relate to publically, we start to appreciate our agency in altering its (content’s) arrangement. Yoga hence depends upon a distinction between identifying with thoughts—propositional attitudes—and thinking, which is yoga (Yoga Sūtra  I.1-3).  The former leads to a pathological inertia. The latter leads to an engagement with ourselves as isolated agents in a public world.

What does any of this have to do with our freedom? Consider the proposition “it is raining outside,” and the corresponding propositional attitude of belief “I believe that it is raining outside.” If we merely thought the former, we could be agnostic about whether it is true, and we could hence investigate whether it were true. But in the latter case, when we believe that it is raining outside, we treat the matter as settled.  Worse, the latter state of believing the proposition is made true by virtue of the attitude of belief, and not the proposition in question. So it could be true “I believe that it is raining outside,” while it is false that it is raining outside. But when I treat the matter as settled because I believe it, I swap out thinking for a propositional attitude and thereby do not investigate, and the latter appears true to me by virtue of my attitude. Patañjali’s point is that when we engage in this confusion, we then give up on our own freedom to know and investigate and instead operate according to natural forces that impinge on our psychology. In this state we not only lack insight into the facts, but also the agential ground of the ersatz reality we live by to be found in our past choices to believe, fear or relate to mental content as though it defined our thoughts.

Of late, I have come back to the Yoga Sūtra and include teaching it in many introductory courses on philosophy for this distinction between thinking and engaging in propositional attitudes is vital to the prospects of being reasonable.  In order to evaluate whether, an argument is valid (whether the conclusion has to be true on the assumption of the truth of the premises), inductions are strong (whether the proposed evidence supports an inductive generalization) and even abductions (whether a given explanation is really the best relative to the alternatives) involves drawing a distinction between what is true or what we take to be true, and what is supported by inferential evidence.  And the move to the reasonable involves getting over one’s own point of view (one’s ego) in the assessment of the inferential strength of arguments. This is unintelligible if thoughts and beliefs come to the same thing. And hence, engaging in yoga (where we pry apart propositional content from our attitudes) is a condition of  appreciating the force of arguments that one might not agree to.  More importantly, it is central to appreciating that truth, and how one sees the world, does not make for valid or commendable reasoning—an error that is constituted by adopting a nonyogic approach to mental content.

Finally, an important feature of Yoga is that it is a basic ethical theory. To make this clear, consider that ethical theories can be understood as a disagreement about the relationship and priority of the Right or the Good.  Yoga as we learn about it from Patañjali is the theory that the right choice is defined by a procedural ideal,  the Lord (Īsvara), which is further defined by the characteristics of unconservativism and self-governance (YS I.24). Accordingly there is no good but the perfection of the practice of devotion to the Lord (unconservativism and self-governance), for in this devotion to the ideal of practice, we actualize our own Lordliness over our lives. The Lord is the procedural ideal of choice for it is the procedural ideal of persons as such: persons are the kinds of things that thrive when they are not bound to their past (unconservative) and free to determine their own future (self-governing). Importantly, the Lord is Right (a procedural ideal) and not necessarily Good (in the sense of being a desirable or recommendable outcome or end). To be devoted to the Lord (a non-proprietary abstraction) is hence to be devoted to our common interests as people (which cuts across species lines): squirrels, fish, the Earth and humans share an interest in their own Lordliness.  Correlatively, one can practice yoga perfectly without being very good at it, for the practice is defined not by its success but its fidelity to the ideal. Whereas Deontologists can identify duties and rights as goods that are to be justified for procedural reasons (Alexander and Moore Winter 2012), Yoga goes further by rejecting that ethical practice (dharma)  is essentially or necessarily good: it is rather right (cf. Yoga Sūtra  IV.29), and we can practice the right without being good at it, and its moral traits are invariant with respect to the goodness of our practice (for more, see Ranganathan 2017b). Indeed, at points, Patañjali appears to suggest that the goodness and success of practice may even be a distraction (Yoga Sūtra III.46). And indeed, an important part of this tradition of Yoga is to reject that the good is anything we should be concerned about in ethical practice: that is an incidental consequence. Rather our primary concern is devotion to the Lord and hence our own Lordliness. These ideas have been extremely influential in M.K. Gandhis’ formulation of the anti-colonial theory of direct action (to be found historically in Yoga Sūtra  II.30-34), but show up in further movements of direct action that take inspiration from Gandhi’s model (for more, see Ranganathan 2019). Direct action is not a tactic for Yoga: it is merely how a well-lived life looks like in the face of opposition.  And when undertaken properly, it has the effect of getting others to renounce their hostility as it is founded on nonharmfulness, the political value that protects our common interest in Lordliness (YS II.35).

There are of course other traditions of philosophy from the Indian tradition that give pride of place to meditation. Yoga Philosophy is dedicated to sharing and disseminating research based knowledge on them too—traditions such as early and later Buddhism that are teleological and give importance to maximizing the good or good character. However, Yoga, as a philosophical tradition motivates Yoga Philosophy. Yoga uniquely opens research into and on philosophy.

Yoga and Research into and on Philosophy

We can draw a distinction between two approaches to understanding that mirror Patañjali’s distinction between identifying with thought and experience, on the one hand, and engaging in disciplinary research (yoga) on the other.

Call the first approach interpretation. When one interprets, one treats the object of inquiry, such as ideas, thoughts, texts, arguments, as explainable only by way of what one believes. It is a popular option in the Western tradition, finding support in the work of leading twentieth century Analytic and Continental philosophers (cf. Quine 1960: 58-59; Heidegger 2010; Gadamer 1996; ironically, also Derrida 1981; Derrida 2004), who argue that understanding has to fall back on how we see things and what we take to be true—especially from our linguistic, and cultural vantage (in this respect, the latter Wittgenstein’s emphasis on what he called grammar as a constraint on intelligibility is fitting with this trend).  There are two problems with this. First, as what one takes to be true is subjective, interpretation will vary in accordance with the beliefs of the interpreter—even when explaining the same object. Secondly, reason involves drawing a sharp distinction between what one takes to be true or even is true, and what is reasonable. (Think about validity: a valid inference, where the conclusion has to be true if the premises are true, is not the same as an inference with true premises and a true conclusion, which may be invalid.) The expectation that all understanding has to conform to one’s view of the world—or even what is true and factual—is hence unreasonable: we can after all understand valid arguments with false premises. The second approach to understanding I call explication—not to be confused with Carnap’s idea (1950: 3).  To explicate is to treat a perspective as entailing a theory that entails its controversial that use “x” and further what such theories of x converge on as they disagree is the concept x. So for instance, to explicate a perspective on ethics is to look its theory that entails its controversial claims that use “ethics” and to further identify the concept ethics as what competing theories of ethics converge on as they disagree. If you were to interpret ethical theory, you could only understand those options that are reducible to your beliefs about the topic. If you explicate, you pursue the disagreement across ethical theories via logical validity as a means of determining the concept at play in the debate, which in the case of ethics turns out to be the Right or the Good. This is what ethical theories disagree about. As validity does not depend on what we take to be true (or even what is true) we can pursue this method without having to substantively agree on anything.

My way to this distinction started when I was a student of philosophy. I remember rather clearly loving philosophy because interpretation played no important role: in fact, being a good student of philosophy involved explication, which allowed us all to converge on the content of a philosophical position without having to agree. In my case, I found the transition to graduate studies in philosophy initially frustrating. Now merely following a disagreement and understanding the topic of controversy seemed insufficient. I thought I had to defend a position, and take a side and I did not know how to do this without transcending the explicatory boundaries of philosophy. I thought I needed to broaden my thinking and so I paused my philosophy education and undertook an MA in South Asian Studies.

It was normally a one year degree, I had an extra year tacked on because I lacked the background history and language prep. With the actual language (Sanskrit, a bit of Pāli) and historical prep, the degree took me five years to complete. The problem I was interested in when I began was the bizarre and widespread view of scholars of Indian philosophy that Indian philosophers wrote on every topic of philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, logic) except ethics (and political philosophy) (for a review of such opinions, see Ch. 1,  Ranganathan 2017a; Matilal 1989: 5).   If you were to explicate the term “dharma,” you would follow disagreements across theories of dharma to identify the concept of dharma as what such theories disagree about: the Right or the Good.  In this case, the content of uses of “dharma” are fixed not by the individual uses or theoretical outlooks, but disagreements across competing theories: this is the objectivity that opposing theories are getting at and it is an objectivity (transcending the subjective perspectives in question) that we discover. Explicated, it is pretty obvious that moral philosophy was the basic concern of Indian philosophers: theories of dharma define large scale fault lines in the Indian philosophical landscape. (The concept was so important that many positions simply called their theory “dharma.”) But when scholars interpret Indian uses of “dharma” they are committed to understanding each use of the term by way of beliefs or judgments they would endorse. So as the theories of dharma diverged from the outlook of interpreters, they would conclude that “dharma” has many meanings in accordance with the judgments they would be inclined to endorse when “dharma” is used.  For the interpreter, if “dharma” is used where they would identify something as religion, law, or attribute, it takes on these meanings. On the conventional account, not only does “dharma” have many meanings, but uses of “dharma” have no rational connection (Ranganathan 2017c: 52-55).

In short, I have argued in my recent work that whether we find Indian moral philosophy or not depends entirely on whether we elevate our perspective or the truth as the frame for explanation, or whether we see philosophical activity as a contribution to a disagreement, that we identified via logic. And this distinction is a contemporary manifestation of the line being drawn in the Yoga Sūtra between identifying with our experiences and adopting a disciplined and deflationary approach to mental content. To understand philosophy as a disagreement made possible by validity is to take a deflationary approach to the positions we adopt in philosophy. 

My research continued after I returned to philosophy (from South Asian Studies) and undertook a PhD, where translation theory as such, and moral discourse translation in particular, was my focus. One outcome of this research was my discovery of the open secret that even though Analytic and Continental philosophers often act like they have nothing in common, the common view that ties them to their roots in ancient Greek philosophy is that thought is linguistic meaning (an idea united in the Greek idea of logos — one word for thought, reason and language). Another outcome of this research I discovered is that if one adopted this account of thought, one would be inclined to blur the line between thinking and believing, for thought would be equated with what is culturally encoded in one’s language. One’s thoughts would be at base the beliefs that one comes to by way of one’s linguistic competence. But then, intellectuals operating in this tradition (call it the West) would be by and large, and with virtually no exceptions, inclined to interpret alien thought by way of the conflation of thought and belief. But for the same reason, translation becomes a problem for it is thereby conceived as an effort to represent an alien world view, by way of one’s own linguistically encoded world view. Linguistic gaps can be apparently closed by correlating sentences as translations on the basis of pragmatic considerations, but this is the origins of Quinian worries about the determinacy of translation (Ranganathan 2018a). If we correlate translations on the basis of the pragmatic evidence, then we can arrive at incompatible translations on the basis of all possible empirical evidence.

It was at this time while working on a PhD nominally on Analytic (and Continental) philosophy of language, and metaethics that I decided to take up the translation of the Yoga Sūtra from Sanskrit as a project. I was motivated in part because I had agreed to teach the text to students in the community and outside of the university and I found that the typical translations are interpretations that relied upon the philosophical commitments of the translator. The way around this problem is to give up on interpretation, and to adopt something like explication—then we have to understand the content of a philosophical text not in terms of our world view, but its contribution to a disagreement.

Something else semi-miraculous occurred in my research. The Yoga Sūtra  held the kernel of a solution to these problems of translation: an alternate model of thought, according to which a thought is the disciplinary purpose of a representation, which deflates its significance: differing representations with the same disciplinary purpose would express the same thought, and this is not determined by the semantics of the representation. So sentences in differing languages can be translations of each other in texts if they serve the same disciplinary purpose and this common deflationary, disciplinary purpose is their common intensional content. This model of thought is translational and is in keeping with actual practice by actual translators, who do not translate languages but rather specialize in genres of translation (Ranganathan 2018a, 2007).  This actual practice stands in sharp contrast to how translation was discussed by philosophers whether Quine or Derrida, as though translation were a matter of matching up bits of language in the abstract. The yogic turn in my dissertation research was then supported by actual practice by specialized translators, unlike what philosophers usually say about translation. But with the yogic turn, we no longer have to confuse the perspective encoded in our language or culture as the content of thought, and hence, we do not have to conflate thinking with believing. However, if we do adopt the linguistic approach, this conflation of thought with culturally encoded beliefs is all but assured.

Read Part 2 here! 

Shyam Ranganathan

Shyam Ranganathan is a faculty member at the Department of Philosophy, and the York Center for Asian Research, York University Toronto. His research and writing spans areas relevant to the study of non-western, and especially Indian moral philosophy, including the philosophy of language (translation theory), theoretical ethics (normative and metaethics), and Asian philosophy (especially South Asian philosophy). He is author of numerous peer reviewed papers, monographs, edited volumes, and is translator of Patañjali’sYoga Sūtra(Penguin 2008).