In philosophical discourse ‘realism’ usually concerns the relation between a subject of experience – that is, a conscious mind – and a class of objects, which may be more or less broad in scope. If one is a realist about a certain object or thing, then one believes that the thing in question exists independently of one’s experiencing it, whether in perception or as an object of thought. Because the range of things about which one could have such a belief is extremely wide, the term ‘realist’ does not, in itself, have a definite meaning.1Strictly speaking, when one asserts of anyone that he or she is a realist, one ought always to specify what it is that the person is a realist about. Correspondingly, when one ascribes anti-realism to someone, one ought to spell out exactly which class of objects the person is denying subject-independent reality to. In practice, however, the terms
‘realism’ and ‘anti-realism’ often get bandied around in philosophical discussions without their frame of reference being stipulated. In many, perhaps most, cases this is of little importance, since the relevant objects will be determinable from the discursive context. But in certain instances the meaning of the terms remains thor-oughly opaque due to a lack of clarity and precision on the part of the discussants.
Anyone who reads even a small amount of the available interpretive literature on classical SaÅkhya and Yoga will, before long, encounter some particular claims about these Indian systems. Two of these claims have been discussed already in Chapter 2 above, namely that: (1) SaÅkhya is ‘rationalist’ whereas Yoga is ‘mystical’, and (2) SaÅkhya is atheistic whereas Yoga is theistic. Both of these claims, when expressed as simply as this, are in my view highly misleading.
Among the other claims routinely made about SaÅkhya and Yoga are: that they are metaphysically dualist, that they believe prakrti to be a material principle, and that they are philosophically realist. These three claims are closely related, since prakrti is one of the two poles that are regarded as making up the metaphysical dualism, and it is prakrti and its emergents that SaÅkhya and Yoga are held to be realist about. What complicates the interpretive situation, however, is that the imputation of realism is often made, first, without a coherent explanation of what prakrti and its series of emergents are, and hence, second, without any account of how this form of realism relates to the sorts of viewpoints with which the term realism has been more typically associated in western philosophy. The temptation
for interpreters – once prakrti has been defined as a material principle – is to regard ‘prakrti’, ‘material principle’, and ‘the world’ as equivalent terms, and then to either state explicitly, or else leave it to be assumed, that what SaÅkhya and Yoga are realist about is the world of material objects. There is, however, a major problem with this interpretation, which starts to reveal itself as soon as one examines the descriptions of the two co-ultimate metaphysical principles – namely purusa and prakrti, or the ‘seer’ (drastr) and the ‘seeable’ (drfya) – that are presented in the classical texts.
In this chapter I wish to place in question the imputation of realism to SaÅkhya and Yoga, and to argue that such an imputation can be sustained only when unwar-ranted simplifications and conflations are made in relation to the complex posi-tions of these philosophies. I do not wish to dispute the claim that SaÅkhya and Yoga are metaphysically dualist; dualism is indeed one of their defining charac-teristics. I shall argue, however, that the nature of the dualism – and hence the nature of its two polar principles – needs to be properly understood before we can assume that it makes any sense, in the context of SaÅkhya and Yoga thought, to speak of the relation between an experiencing subject and a world of mind-transcendent objects. The argument cannot be completed in a single chapter, for it requires a detailed examination of the concept of prakrti, and this examination will take place mainly in Chapter 5. Here, however, I shall get the argument under way, first by critically scrutinizing some of the core assumptions that are made in the exegetical literature on SaÅkhya and Yoga, and second by focusing more sharply upon a particular passage in the Yogasutra that has been seized upon by many commentators (both traditional and modern) as evidence of Yoga’s realism and its opposition to idealism.
The standard interpretation of SaÇkhya and Yoga (and some of its shortcomings)
Probably the best way of grasping why SaÅkhya and Yoga have so frequently been assumed to be realist is to begin by outlining the main features of what has become the standard interpretation of these systems. Although variations occur between the versions presented by different interpreters, there exists a widely accepted set of core principles, which can be summarized as follows:
1 SaÅkhya and Yoga are metaphysically dualist. They hold that reality comprises two mutually irreducible entities (or ‘substances’ or ‘principles’), which are most commonly referred to as purusa and prakrti.
2 Purusa is the principle of subjectivity or consciousness. Only in its presence can experience take place. There is a multiplicity – indeed, an infinity – of purusas, which in themselves are numerically distinct despite being qualitatively indistinguishable from one another.
3 Prakrti is the principle of objectivity and materiality. It comprises three co-essential constituents or, more literally, ‘strands’ (gujas).When these are
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undisturbed and in equal tension with one another, prakrti remains unmanifest (avyakta). When they are disturbed and out of equilibrium, prakrti becomes manifest (vyakta). It is normally assumed that prakrti is singular.
4 The disturbance of the gujas occurs due to the ‘presence’ or ‘proximity’
(sannidhana [TK 20]) of purusa, and therefore this presence may be regarded as a ‘catalyst’ that stimulates or ‘excites’ the gujas into action, even though purusa itself remains passive.2There was never a time, however, when purusa and prakrti were not compresent, and thus the gujas must, in actuality, have always been active. Despite the ‘beginninglessness’ of their conjunction (YBh 2.22), it is possible for purusa and prakrti to separate, and thus for equilibrium to be established between the gujas.
5 The process of prakrti’s manifestation consists in a series of ‘real transformations’ (Feuerstein 1980: 32; Organ 1975: 211), which together form an evolutionary chain. The whole of empirical reality – the cosmos or world – is produced through this process. ‘Real transformation’ may be taken to imply that the prakrti-generated world is not constitutionally dependent upon purusa, despite the fact that it could not have manifested without purusa’s presence, and that it manifests solely ‘for the purpose of purusa’
(purusartha).
6 The ‘purpose of purusa’ is twofold. It comprises, on the one hand, having experience or ‘enjoyment’ (bhoga) of the world and, on the other hand, tran-scending experience and abiding in a state of self-contained ‘aloneness’
(kaivalya). Since experience is inherently dissatisfying and distressing (duhkha), the former purpose must be regarded as subordinate and auxiliary to the latter.
7 The goal of kaivalya is achieved through the attainment of a self-revealing knowledge. For SaÅkhya this knowledge is arrived at as a result of rational thinking, whereas for Yoga it is acquired by means of supra-rational meditation.
8 Although kaivalya involves only an epistemic and not an ontological change in purusa, it does involve the ‘dissolution’ (laya, pratiprasava) of manifest prakrti into its unmanifest source (cf. SK 65; YS 4.34), which (because the manifestation is ‘real’) can be regarded only as an ontological change.
With respect to the issue of realism, the two most important points in the above summary come under numbers 1 and 5. I shall therefore focus upon these, although, as we will discover, these cannot be considered in isolation from other matters. Point 1 is important because the proposal that prakrti is not ontologically reducible to purusa may be construed as an assertion of prakrti’s subject-independent reality. In short, there is something that exists subject-independently of consciousness. Point 5 pushes this assertion further and claims that not only is the metaphysical ground of the empirical world real, in the sense of being subject-independent, but so is the empirical world itself. I shall say a little more about each of these points in turn.
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A point that needs to be made straightaway is that the modern interpretation of the purusa–prakrti dualism has tended to be heavily influenced by the mind–body dualism common to western metaphysical debate, the most paradigmatic version of this dualism being that of Descartes. For Descartes, since a substance is that which requires nothing else in order to exist, strictly speaking the only genuine substance is God.3However, less strictly we can regard as substances those things that depend for their existence upon nothing other than God; and this definition allows in, on Descartes’s view, res cogitans (‘thinking things’, minds, souls) and res extensae (‘extended things’, bodies, material objects) (Descartes 1985, I: 210).
Interpreters of SaÅkhya and Yoga are generally reluctant to speak of purusa as a substance. This is probably because, in spite of the long history of expressions such as ‘spiritual substance’ and ‘immaterial substance’ in western philosophy, there remains a sneaking suspicion that ‘substance’, if not a precise synonym of
‘matter’, at least implies it.4No such qualms need interfere with the characteri-zation of prakrti, however. To this principle the term ‘substance’ is freely applied, as, for example, when Radhakrishnan declares that ‘Prakrti is the fundamental substance out of which the world evolves’ (1927, II: 266),5or Davies defines it as
‘a blind unconscious force, or rather a primal substance’ (1894: 105 n.2). Indeed, some modern commentators have not merely defined prakrti in terms of sub-stance, but have translated it as such (on occasions endowing ‘Substance’ with a capital initial).6 More common, however, are phrases that involve ‘matter’ or
‘nature’. The majority of translators of SaÅkhya and Yoga texts render prakrti and its synonyms by expressions such as ‘primordial matter’ (Jhâ 1896), ‘primordial nature’ (Larson 1979), and ‘primal nature’ (Suryanarayana Sastri 1948). And in commentarial or critical literature written in European languages, we frequently find talk of such things as ‘the Unmanifested or primal matter’ (Davies 1894: 17),
‘primal virgin matter’ (Zimmer 1953: 225), ‘primitive matter’ (Garbe 1899: 10;
Macdonell 1900: 391), and ‘sheer materiality’ (Larson 1980: 307). All of these terms are presumably intended to accord prakrti the status of being an ultimate and self-existent substance in something approximating the Cartesian sense.
Thus, although no interpreter would be reckless enough to equate purusa and prakrti with Cartesian minds and bodies, the basic picture of a metaphysical substance-dualism is ascribed in common to both philosophies.
As an aside, it is appropriate to note here that, in order for a philosophical position to be externally realist – that is, realist with regard to empirical objects – it need not necessarily be dualist. Far from it. Physicalism (or materialism), for example, is monist in the sense that it proposes that everything, including supposedly ‘mental’ states and events, can be ‘reduced to’ (i.e. explained exclusively in terms of) physical states and events. Yet physicalists are certainly realists about empirical objects. That is, they hold that the objects we common-sensically take to be external to our minds are indeed external to our minds (insofar as they are external to our brains) and would continue to exist even if all conscious beings were annihilated (albeit, perhaps, not with precisely the same properties that we assume them to have in perceptual awareness).7Conversely, it
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is not necessary for a philosophy to be monist in order for it to be anti-realist about empirical objects (and hence ‘idealist’ in the most usual sense of this term).
Although Kant, for example, would not wish to commit himself to either a monist or a dualist metaphysics – as to do so would, from his point of view, be to over-step the boundary of reason – it is nevertheless conceivable that a metaphysics could combine an affirmation of the unknowability of the thing-in-itself with a denial that the conscious subject can be reduced to that thing. In Chapter 6, I shall propose that this is in fact very close to the stance taken by SaÅkhya and Yoga.
But a good deal of background interpretive work will need to be done first.
The view of SaÅkhya and Yoga that purusa and prakrti are co-ultimate ontological principles is, on its own, a very minimal kind of realism. While it shows that the two Indian systems are realist about at least these two principles, in itself this is not of much philosophical interest. After all, everyone has to be a realist about something. As Descartes pointed out in the second of his Meditations, the very act of doubting the existence of things requires the existence of a doubter (and even if one refuses to grant this – as Nietzsche did for example8– the exis-tence of the doubt itself cannot be denied); therefore a complete scepticism ends in self-contradiction. The minimal kind of realism that has just been attributed to SaÅkhya and Yoga is not entirely trivial, however, since it is a necessary precondition for the more interesting kind that is asserted in point 5.
In point 5 we have the assertion of an ostensibly more familiar sort of realism, namely that which consists in the claim that ‘the world’ – that is, the extensive realm of things and events that we have experiences of and thoughts about – does not depend upon purusa for its existence, but is produced out of unmanifest prakrti via a process of material changes or evolutions. It is this notion that Richard King, whom I quoted at the end of the last chapter, has in mind when he declares of SaÅkhya: ‘The school upholds a thoroughgoing realism. The world around us is real and independent of our perception of it being a series of mate-rial evolutes (parijama) deriving from prakrti’ (1999: 65). And King is far from being alone in holding this view. Arthur Macdonell voiced it a hundred years ear-lier; by SaÅkhya, he said, ‘The world is maintained to be real, and that from all eternity; for the existent can only be produced from the existent’ (1900: 391).
Before him John Davies, in a discussion of the SaÅkhya view of perception, wrote that Kapila (to whom Davies attributes the classical SaÅkhya teachings)
‘accepted our sense-perceptions as representating a real external world, which exists in itself, and not merely as a projection of our sensations or thoughts’, and he adds that ‘The Vedantist doctrine, that the material world is only maya, or illusion, was not held by him’ (1894: 103). The contrast with Vedanta – by which term is typically meant the Advaita (‘non-dualist’) Vedanta of Fakkara – is a relatively common feature of claims concerning the realism of SaÅkhya and Yoga. Arthur Keith draws it when he writes that ‘nature [prakrti] is essentially other than spirit [purusa]: it is not, as in Vedanta, a production of ignorance, but is as real as spirit itself’ (1949: 89); and so does Eliade when he remarks that
‘For SaÅkhya and Yoga, the world is real (not illusory – as it is, for example, for
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Vedanta)’ (1969: 9, original emphasis). Later in this chapter I shall call attention to some statements made by Fakkara which show that he did not consistently hold the empirical world to be illusory; but let us now inquire whether there is any plau-sibility in the obviously widespread view that SaÅkhya and Yoga regard it as real.
In the opening sentence of the above paragraph I noted that, according to point 5, the world does not depend upon purusa for its existence. In a western philosoph-ical context it would be normal to describe external realism as the view that the world does not depend for its existence upon the mind or, in other words, upon our ‘cognitive apparatus’ or ‘perceptual equipment’, etc. With regard to SaÅkhya and Yoga, however, it cannot be described in this way, since what is meant by ‘the world’ is not at all what is normally understood by this expression in western philosophical parlance, and neither of course is purusa equivalent to ‘mind’,
‘cognitive apparatus’, or similar constructions. This point is crucial, for it not only highlights the inappropriateness of designating prakrti as ‘the world’, but also – as I hope to show in this and the subsequent two chapters – ultimately undermines the whole realist interpretation as it is generally formulated.
Taken in its broadest sense, ‘the world’ can mean simply ‘everything that exists’ or ‘the whole of reality’. In that case, when applied to the philosophy of SaÅkhya and Yoga, it would encompass both prakrti and purusa. In discussions of realism and anti-realism, however, ‘the world’ invariably stands in opposition to the cognizing subject or mind. When we ask in such discussions whether the world is mind-independent, we are clearly not including ‘mind’ within ‘the world’, for it would be unintelligible to ask whether the mind is independent of itself. Nor can we be including mental states, contents, faculties and suchlike; for these, too, could not be thought of as mind-independent (cf. Alston 2002: 1).
When, however, Larson (or any other interpreter of SaÅkhya or Yoga) says that
‘The purusa, which is consciousness, witnesses every level of the manifest world, and the manifest world does what it does because of or for the sake of purusa’
(1979: 176), the phrase ‘the manifest world’ must not be regarded as excluding the mind and its contents. On the contrary, it must be regarded as referring primarily to the mind and its contents, and only secondarily to anything that exists outside it. For no interpreter of the systems concerned – even one who insists that everything to do with prakrti is in some sense ‘material’ – would seriously deny that at least the majority of prakrti’s manifest forms is presented as being mental.
Purusa, meanwhile, can indeed be designated as consciousness, just as Larson designates it in the quotation above. This assessment is supported by purusa’s being identified with cetana (SK 55), which is itself best translated as
‘consciousness’, and (at SK 19) with such states as ‘seer-ness’ (drastrtva) and
‘witnessing’ (saksitva), which latter term the quotation from Larson also alludes to. Yet purusa is patently not the kind of experiencing subject or self with which
‘the world’ is normally contrasted in western philosophy. Although many varied conceptions of such a subject exist in the western tradition, the most prevalent of these include its being complex and active, possessing a range of faculties (capacities, powers) by means of which it is able to engage with the world – to
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perceive it, think about it, and make more-or-less voluntary decisions to act in it, often in ways that have ethical implications.9 Indeed, in western parlance,
‘subject’ and ‘self’ (and in earlier times ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’) have often been used interchangeably with ‘mind’ and ‘person’, thereby bolstering an assumption that the subject of experience must possess the kinds of properties that are typically attributed to minds, such as those of being able to undergo certain ‘states’ and intentionally hold certain perceptual and conceptual contents. It has come to be
‘subject’ and ‘self’ (and in earlier times ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’) have often been used interchangeably with ‘mind’ and ‘person’, thereby bolstering an assumption that the subject of experience must possess the kinds of properties that are typically attributed to minds, such as those of being able to undergo certain ‘states’ and intentionally hold certain perceptual and conceptual contents. It has come to be