Part 1 of this series can be found here.
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 tackle the question of religion and its relationship to yoga. In the following section, I provide a brief summary of the past two posts.
Religion?
So far I have been providing an account (arguing gently I think) for taking Yoga seriously, not merely because it is a historically important and influential contribution to the possibilities of philosophy but because it also alights the requirements of reason, and thinking as something distinct from one’s own subjective or intersubjective vantage. Thinking is about relating to content that is objective by way of deflating the importance of mental content, and the objectivity of this content is exactly what we can disagree about from differing perspectives in a public world as isolated observers. The practice of distinguishing between identifying with our experiences and thinking is correlatively an essential part of engaging in reasoning, for reasoning does not take propositional attitudes as its objects, but thoughts and other evidence that we can disagree about from differing vantages. (Indeed, propositional attitudes are famous as intensional contexts, which stymie inference.) This disagreement about thoughts and concepts at the highest levels is philosophy.
One obvious challenge to all of this is the claim that yoga is a part of Hinduism, a religion, and religion is spirituality not philosophy. So to rely upon religion—Yoga—as though it is essential to philosophy is nonsense.
First I take it that it is a cogent inductive generalization that the only things that are counted as religions in our world (that is, which are allowed to be practiced and recognized as religions) are traditions that do not have their roots in the European intellectual tradition going back to Greek philosophy. Greek mythology is relegated to literature or the classics, and anything else that might have been indigenous European religion has been marginalized. Christianity and Islam (two prominent religions) though highly influenced by Greek philosophy have extra European roots, as does Judaism. Second, if we adopt explication, we never find religion: only philosophy. If we interpret on the basis of the European tradition, then anything with cultural roots outside of this tradition will seem both mysterious and inexplicable. This is what gets called religion in our world. It is been going on for 2000 years so it is difficult to spot. What is been going on? The marginalization of non-western thinking as mysterious, traditional and some how outside of the bounds of philosophy which is, identifiable with the European intellectual tradition. The process of religifying alien perspectives has two steps: (a) assume European philosophy as the content of reason, (b) interpret alien positions not in terms of their contributions to philosophical disagreement but by way of their deviation from European philosophy. Non-western positions that are religified become at once marginalized and co-opted by the West into treating it as the content of philosophy as they try to present themselves as religion. Why does the whole world interpret the options from the Eurocentric perspective? Because the traditional European approach to thought (the linguistic account of thought) results in interpretation that renders dissent unintelligible. And this has been the political reality of the world dominated by Western imperialism, which is nothing but a political entailment of its muddled account of thought. For me this became increasingly clear as I started to become aware of the history of Indian and Asian religion.
When the British take control of South Asia, they decide that they need a term for all indigenous Indian religion, and they opt for “Hindu” (which comes from the same root as our word “India”) (cf. Gottschalk 2012; Ranganathan 2018b). At that point, the entire Indian philosophical tradition, all its varied disagreements and positions—everything from atheism, and evolutionary materialism to theism—gets branded as Hindu. But then after this naming event, the process of religification commences. One outcome is that Indians start confabulating en masse on the question of what Hindus believe. Historically, Hindus did not all believe anyone thing, and their ancestors shared no founding figure or texts: historically, the options of Hinduism are the options of the disagreements of philosophy. And indeed, prior to this, no one thought of themselves as Hindu. After British imperialism, virtually everyone in South Asia took religion to be the basis of identity. Another outcome is that everyone who wanted to be counted as having a distinct religious identity, got one, and often the identity revolved around not being Hindu (as though that were a thing). And for many it continues to be a thing: for many, being Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, or (fill in the blank), is in part a decision not to be Hindu, which is then defined by the many evils one wishes to avoid. So to be a Buddhist is to reject being a Hindu on this account. But there were no Hindus around when the Buddha started to identify his unique contribution to Indian philosophy—we had to wait for the British for that. The entire foil crumbles when we start to observe that such identities were created by colonialism. Before the British, there was no way to be a Hindu aside from being Indian. After the British, most Indians think they are Hindus, and are on a race to figure out what that means — and for many this has turned into a far right project of the creation of a nationalist Hindu identity (Sharma 2011). And this is a model of political organization that only makes sense as a continuation of the West.
One ironic outcome, I argue, is that if we want to recover philosophy from the West’s assault on reason by its conflation of thought and cultural representation (language), we have to study Hinduism’s philosophical disagreements, for that will give us some sense of what it is to relate to each other without having to agree on anything substantive: saying something true about this tells us something true about the possibilities of philosophy (Ranganathan 2018b). One further surprising outcome of these considerations is that, though Hinduism is unusual in being coextensive with the disagreements of philosophy, it is not unusual in how it acquired its religious identity. It acquired its identity as a religion via the West that sets itself up as the content of reason via its historical linguistic approach to thought. None of this is easy to see if one simply identifies with the contents of one’s experiences, for then it seems like the distinction between European philosophy and everyone else Religion is a fact. Taking the yogic turn reveals this to be a farce. When Plato or Descartes talk about God, that is secular philosophy. When historical brown South Asians talk about evolutionary materialism (Sāṅkhya) or Vedic-Identity Atheism (Pūrva Mīmāṃsā) that is Hinduism. And indeed, the yogic turn shows that religion is very much like what race is like for a constructivist (James 2016). Like race, religion is created by the identification of some population as the paradigm (the European) and all else is judged by way of their deviation from the paradigm. Religion is to our intellectual possibilities what race is to bodies. It both marginalizes but also obscures the underlying potential it suffocates. And often, the West has also appropriated the marginalized intellectual possibility (such as Christianity or Islam) as a means of affirming its own expansionist hegemony.
My Yoga inspired work on this joins a trend of informed scholarship on religion (unlike the dominant trend of restricting reflection on the topic to Abrahamic paradigms). But my Yoga inspired work also provides the answer to why it is that there is no common content to religions (Harrison 2006), and yet the naïve distinction between the secular and the religious treats Europe’s intellectual history as the content of secularism (cf. Cabezón 2006: for complementary observations) but also universalism (Masuzawa 2005), and all else as religion. And it is Yoga that really made this insight possible: that the prioritization of the European tradition in the explanation of everything intellectual is a function of a failure to take a disciplinary approach to thought. And, given the hegemony of the linguistic account of thought in the European tradition that gives rise to this unyogic approach, the prioritization of the European is a self-fulfilling prophecy—and so is the marginalization of Yoga as religion.
Thus, With Certainty, (We) Delve into the Definitive Explication of Yoga. (YS 1.1)
For me, the various threads of my research came to a head when I was teaching critical thinking. Here the concept of validity was the corner stone of the entire course and yet, I found that no sooner did we move on to a different topic, where students had to apply or make use of validity in their evaluation of arguments (and I was no longer spelling out validity on the board with examples) that this knowledge would disappear and would be replaced by an appropriation of the concept. Students would use “valid” not as a means of evaluating inferential relations between premises and their conclusion, but as a term of endorsement, for what they agree to, or take to be true. My students were as a group, with few exceptions, knee jerk interpreters and it seemed deeply engrained. But then so are the Indologists that I studied, and moreover so too Western philosophers writing on reason at the boundaries of cultural familiarity, such as Quine, Gadamer or Derrida. It became increasingly clear to me that the problem is not that my students are cognitively challenged: rather, they are victims of a pathological anti-intellectual tradition—the West. This is a cultural tradition that would rather Socrates die than entertain alternative gods and risk corrupting the youth with philosophy. It is a tradition that has persecuted philosophy, free intellectual activity and cultural diversity through the majority of its history (especially in the form of proselytization and imperialism), because it confuses thought and reason with cultural conformity in the form of what is linguistically encoded. It is the tradition that invented religion as a category to quarantine the European intellectual tradition from philosophical research from other continents and then reappropriated what it marginalizes in the form of “official” religion as a means of affirming its own hegemony. It constitutes a background commitment to the idea that when we are thinking, we are merely rummaging through our beliefs—as though. Its contemporary effort to kill philosophy consists in the equation of philosophy with doxography.
Yoga in contrast is a devotion to the procedural ideals involved in thinking and reasoning, which calls out and renders explicit the pathological tendencies of interpretation that arrive with the confusion of thought with one’s attitudes. The idea behind Yoga Philosophy is to reclaim the space for philosophy in public discourse, where we no longer have to confuse the contingencies of our life for the possibilities we can entertain. And what better way to do this than to engage directly with interested practitioners of yoga and philosophy! Philosophers, please join and let us continue the conversation!
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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).
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