1

A Comparison of Michel Foucault’s and Patanjali’s

Concepts and Practices of Freedom

Isaac Mullins
574086

Study of Religions
Independent Study Project
24 April 2015

Supervisor: Sîan Hawthorne

Word Count:10000
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Table of Contents

Introduction..............................................................................4
I. Foucault’s Freedom...............................................................4
Sovereign Power, Biopower..................................................4
Exposing limited freedoms....................................................8
The entwined notions of positive and negative freedoms...11
II. Patanjali’s freedom............................................................15
Patanjali’s Ashtanga Yoga..................................................16
Samadhi...............................................................................17
The four states of ‘super consciousness’.............................19
III. Askesis and Astanga Yoga as Practices of Liberation.....22
Freedom in Practice.............................................................22
Conclusion..............................................................................27
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Abstract

Freedom is a concept that has been abused throughout history (whether consciously or
unconsciously) to further particular ideologies and agendas. It is readily apparent that
in the enunciation of any positive articulation of freedom, freedom becomes
antithetical to itself. In the qualification of freedom, the potential for the manifestation
of its opposite arises and it thus becomes opposable; freedom is frozen in time,
categorised, and thus leads to the question of freedom from such categories. I argue
that both Foucault and Patanjali, understand the concept of freedom to be a sign that
points the way to non-opposable ontologies and thus less violent realities; absolute
and undefinable in positive terms. I also argue that both philosophers offer practices
that allow the subject to move beyond a reactionary existence determined by his/her
conditioning and towards a less hindered, less tainted, and more conscious awareness
of things as they are.
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Introduction

The idea for this essay came from a nagging feeling that the interpretation of yoga in
the West has led to its absorption by a capitalist agenda which pacifies potential
resistance, and increasingly promotes consumerism as part of its discourse. I hoped
through writing this essay I would come to a greater understanding of the freedom on
offer in Patanjali’s sutras. The disjuncture between my own experience as a yoga
practitioner and the portrayal of yoga in the West continues to baffle me; they appear
contradictory. In my studies as an undergraduate, Michel Foucault’s notions of
biopower and the care of the self seemed to provide a useful framework by which an
attempt to rescue the distorted contemporary vision of yoga might become possible.
This essay will begin by outlining Foucault’s notions of modern power,
specifically sovereign power and biopower, in order to formulate questions of
resistance. I will then survey some examples of practical studies that have used
Foucault’s understanding of power to investigate the complexities that surround the
possibility of liberation from it. The second part of this essay offers an analysis of
Patanjali’s concept of samadhi as a state of freedom. Finally in part three, I will offer
an examination of both Patanjali’s and Foucault’s practices of freedom.
This essay does not attempt to validate the freedoms of Patanjali or Michel
Foucault. That is, it does not seek to consider whether such freedoms are possible or
attainable. If human freedom is in fact attainable, such an understanding is clearly
beyond the scope of any human being who is not yet free. Rather, this essay asks
whether or not Patanjali and Foucault’s conceptions and theorisations of freedom
conflict, and further, whether the methodology that Patanjali suggests for the
attainment of freedom, risks abduction or offers liberation?
.

I. Foucault’s Freedom

Sovereign Power, Biopower

In order to understand Foucault’s notion of modern power, one must first consider his
understanding of sovereign power, which preceded what he termed ‘biopower’. Seen
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as derived from the patria protestas, which allowed the patriarch of Roman families
to take the lives of his slaves and children, sovereign power was in essence ‘the right
to decide life and death’ (Foucault,1978:135). Over time, sovereign power diminished
from outright dominion over life and death- absolute and unconditional- to a form that
could only be exercised when the sovereign’s life itself was in peril. Nonetheless,
though diminished, sovereign power continued to be maintained and utilised through
an explicit emphasis on death. That is, it was not the sovereign’s ability to preserve
life that gave him power, but the overt exercising of his right to kill (ibid. 135-138).
Power was exercised through the subtraction of the subject; the right to seize things,
bodies, and one’s very existence, deduction functioned on the ‘principle of levying-
violence, which governed the economy of power’ (Foucault, 1995:208). Foucault
refers to this mechanism of power as ‘deduction’ (prélèvement). In summary
deduction can be understood as culminating in the dispensation of seizing life in order
to conquer it.
Following the Classical Age, Foucault argues that the mechanisms of power in
the West underwent a profound transformation (Foucault, 1978; 1980). ‘Deduction’
was reduced from the major source of power to one among many. The new power
(biopower), Foucault writes, was ‘bent on generating forces, making them grow, and
ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or
destroying them’ (Foucault, 1978:136). In short, the emphasis shifts from the right to
kill, to ‘the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life’ (ibid.). In
their book Empire, M. Hardt and A. Negri define biopower on this basis alone:

Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following
it, interpreting it, absorbing it—every individual embraces and reactivates this
power of his or her own accord. Its primary task is to administer life. Biopower
thus refers to a situation in which what is directly at stake in power is the
production and reproduction of life itself."
(Hardt and Negri, 2000: 24)

Although from this viewpoint, biopower may sound like a progressive development,
Foucault is quick to point out that such a teleological reading is unfounded, arguing
instead that wars and genocides have never been so prevalent and bloody since the
metamorphosis in power mechanisms occurred (M. Foucault, 1978:137), and thus,
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Hardt and Negri’s definition is perhaps limited and somewhat overenthusiastic. Power
of death is now presented as necessary for the preservation of life, and its ability to
positively influence life positively is affected through a process of control and
complete regulation; it is, as Foucault later writes, ‘in every aspect the antithesis of
that mechanism of power which the theory of sovereignty described or sought to
transcribe’ (Foucault 1980:104). Importantly however, Foucault notes that although
the physical representation of the sovereign is no longer visible, the mechanisms of
sovereignty still function:

This non-sovereign power, which lies outside the form of sovereignty, is a

disciplinary power. Impossible to describe in the terminology of the theory of
sovereignty on which it differs so radically, this disciplinary power ought by rights to
have led to the disappearance of the grand juridical edifice created by that theory.
But in reality, that theory of sovereignty has continued not only to exist as an
ideology of right, but also to provide the organising principle of the legal codes
which Europe acquired in the nineteenth century, beginning with the Napoleonic
code.
(Foucault 1980:105).

The difference now is that death is no longer disseminated as a means to protect the
sovereign, but on behalf of entire populations in the cause of the maintenance of life.
Power is now located and implemented at the level of life, species, race, and large-
scale population. Therefore, in contrast to Hardt and Negri’s reading, biopower does
not administer life in its entirety—each individual embracing it of their own accord—
but only the life forms that are in line with its specific rationality. As Sergei Prozorov
explains: ‘Biopower makes one live the existence it has first captured and confined. In
this manner, human existence is recast as a project, endowed with identity, subjected
to authority and granted a teleological destination’ (Prozorov 2007:18).
Foucault states that this power evolved and manifested through two basic
modes. Not diametrically opposed, they act as two poles of development connected by
a multiplicity of relations. The first to be formed, Foucault called the anatomo-politics
of the human body, where power is concentrated on the maximum extortion of the
body’s capabilities and the optimization of the body’s mechanisms in service of its
(often capitalist) agenda. This power is exhorted over the body through its
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‘disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the
parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into efficient and
economic controls’ (Foucault, 1978:139).
The second pole, which follows later, he terms the biopolitics of the
population, and is concerned with the regulation and control of population; the
species body: ‘the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of
the biological processes: propogation, births and mortality, the level of health, life-
expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary’ (ibid.).
The body in its anatomical and biological, its individual and collective sense, was thus
the locus upon which modern power directed its attention. Not, as previously
discussed, through threat of death, but by investing ‘life through and through’ (ibid.:
138). It is no longer deduction but a subtle abduction that now acts as the primary
force of power upon the modern subject. In this state of abduction one views oneself,
and is viewed by others, as free, yet it is this very illusion of ‘freedom’ that
simultaneously operates as a subtle form of constraint whilst simultaneously
preventing the realisation of an alternative, and potentially more complete mode of
freedom. Foucault argues that it is the ‘measure of freedom’ offered that allows one to
accept the limitations placed on their freedom. That is, the law of interdiction is
allowed to function, and is readily accepted, because it provides the illusion of safety
and security, which in turn acts as the preserver of life and the giver of freedom:

Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its
success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms. Would power
be accepted if it were entirely cynical? For it, secrecy is not in the nature of an
abuse; it is indispensible to its operation. Not only because power imposes
secrecy on those whom it dominates, but because it is perhaps just as
indispensable to the latter: would they accept it if they did not see it as a mere
limit placed on their desire, leaving a measure of freedom-however slight-in
tact. Power as a pure limit set on freedom is, at least in our society, the general
form of its acceptability.
(Foucault, 1978:86)

The possibility of a maximum freedom is curtailed so that the guarantee of a

minimum freedom can exist. Power’s function is disguised through a discourse of
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protection that appears opposed to it but is actually intrinsic to its operation.

Exposing limited freedoms

Foucault’s perception of the general acceptance of modern power as a ‘limit set on

freedom’, steered him toward an investigation into how the power relations of
dominion and disparity were implemented and sustained through voluntarily accepted
social practices (Foucault, 1978; 1980; 1981; 2003b). This insight is far from pure
hypothesis and has provided the foundation for many practical studies.1 Such studies
demonstrate how subjects have been motivated to pursue the liberation of their ‘true
selves’ at the expense of the acceptance of their authentic mode of reality; to seek
minimum freedom at the expense of maximum freedom.
Heidi Marie Rimke, for example, uses a Foucauldian framework to analyse
the motivations and effects of self-help guides. She observes that the preoccupation
with self-liberation/enlightenment is the political outcome of a ‘hyper-individuality’,
which is fostered by the essentialist psychologisation of the self in day-to-day
existence:

The self-helping confession’s promise to reveal our deepest truest selves becomes
so appealing that it is difficult for the self-helper to see or to break from the web
of power relations in which the promise is rooted. For, after all, even the most
private self- examination is tied to myriad systems of external regulation:
sciences and pseudo-sciences, religious and moral doctrines.
(Rimke, 2000:69-70)

Her analysis rests on Foucault’s understanding of the confessional technology of

subjectification, which emphasises the psychological connection between humanity’s
inherent desire for identity and government rationalities (Foucault, 1978; 1988).
Rimke reiterates Foucault’s argument that the confessional genre forms a crucial
component in the increasing governmental technology of the self. Elaborating on
Foucault’s insight that ‘Western man has become a confessing animal’ (Foucault,
1978:59), Dreyfus and Rabinow explain that the process of continuous confession to
1
See for example, Rimke, 2000; Rose, 1990; Edwards, 2002; Mahmood, 2005; Abu-Lughod, 1990.
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oneself and to others embeds ‘the individual in a network of relations of power with
those who claim to be able to extract the truth of these confessions through their
possession of the keys to interpretation’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982:174). As the
notion of original sin leads the religious adherent to seek the possibility of redemption
through a reliance on external authorities, the seeker of the true self is left susceptible
to suggestion, and vulnerable to their abduction into government rationalities.
Inherent in confession is the admission of ignorance and the subsequent subservience
toward those that that know better. Thus, the question arises: what/who does the
knowledge offered serve? For example, Rimke argues that inherent in the
proclamation of what constitutes healthy behavior and what formats the best types of
self-development, ‘the self-help experts themselves are providing social, not
psychological, rules of conduct’ (Rimke, 2000:70). Furthermore, the rules of the social
practices of modernity-of which self-help is one-‘fetishize and glorify the liberalized and
psychologized individual’ (ibid.). Thus, Rimke illustrates Foucault’s point that the
enlightenment practices of modernity which initially appear as emancipatory, actually
limit and reduce the freedom of the individual, and thus increase the social relations
of domination and inequality.
Saba Mahmood provides an equally revealing inquiry into limiting freedoms.
She demonstrates that any resistance based on singular notions of the constitution of
freedom are simply different forms of power acting on other forms of power, and this
enables her to question normative liberal assumptions ‘that human agency primarily
consists of acts that challenge social norms, and not those that uphold them’
(Mahmood, 2005:5; emphasis added).2 To illustrate her point, Mahmood provides the
wonderful example of the scholarship of Abu-Lughod, who examines the acts of
Bedouin women that choose to wear ‘sexy lingerie’ as a means of resistance to
parental authority and social norms. Abu-Lughod suggests that this act of resistance
should not be seen as exempt from the conditions of power, but as derived from
practices of capitalist consumerism. Abu-Lughod explains that observation of ‘forms
of resistance in particular societies can help us become critical of partial or
reductionist theories of power’ and that we must ‘respect everyday resistance not just
by arguing for the dignity or heroism of the resisters but by letting their practices

2
She demonstrates this through the analysis of fieldwork undertaken with a women’s mosque
movement in Egypt. See: Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist
Subject (2005).
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teach us about complex interworkings of historically changing structures of power’

(Abu-Lughod, 1990:53, cited in Mahmood, 2005:9). Highlighting epistemic
subjectivity and the consequential dangers of subjective ideologies, Mahmood
concludes her study by urging us to ask: ‘does a commitment to the ideal of equality
in our own lives endow us with the capacity to know that this ideal captures what is or
should be fullfilling for everyone else?’ (Mahmood, 2005:38). If not, she suggests that
political projects should be left ‘productively open’ and not prematurely closed ‘for
the sake of “political clarity”’ (ibid:39). Though Mahmood’s study is specifically
concerned with the politics of feminism, her conclusion can be applied to all
ideologies, whether political, cultural, or—especially when discussing freedom—
individual.
In summary, empirical studies such as Rimke’s, Mahmood’s, and Abu-
Lughod’s, demonstrate how the promises of ‘true’ freedoms are rooted in the very
structures of power that they attempt to resist. Furthermore, these ‘true’ freedoms can
be used as methods of indoctrination to coerce the subject into accepting, and actively
participating, in self-sustaining government rationalities. Such studies illustrate that
any discourse on freedom that attempts to qualify what freedom might look like-
describing the qualities it does or does not possess- leaves it subservient to a
biopolitics which by definition it must seek to oppose. In short, if freedom can be
translated into the realm of the signified it enters into the sphere of correlation and
binary opposition, and thus becomes ideological and potentially opposed. If it can be
opposed, it must either be victorious or resigned to failure, it must live or it must die.
Thus what dies in the alignment with a singular freedom, and in the explication of a
singular freedom, is freedom itself. A freedom-friendly order is oxymoronic, as any
given order, even a utopian one, establishes parameters within which freedom would
find itself limited. Foucault reiterates this notion arguing that an ideology ‘…always
stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth’
(Foucault, 1980:118). Thus, the problem of freedom persists as the unanswerable
question of freedom from whichever order has subsumed it into its own ideology. It
stands to reason then, that freedom must remain forever in a state of perpetual
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potentiality,3 and that therefore, liberal distinctions between positive and negative
freedoms hold little relevance to a possible Foucauldian freedom.

The entwined notions of positive and negative freedoms

It is clear that for Foucault the autonomous subject cannot exercise her reason and
will outside of the specific set of conditions within modernity which ensure that
freedom and sovereignty are offered whilst denied. Foucault writes:

If I am now interested in how the subject constitutes itself in an active fashion

through practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something
invented by the individual himself. They are models that he finds in his culture
and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and
his social group.

(Foucault, 2003a:34)

Thought and behaviour situated outside of neutrality/potentiality are therefore seen as

mere reflections of the socialisation of the subject. However, whether or not Foucault
believes in an element of freedom within the confines of one’s relative existence is
unclear:

Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are ‘free’. By
this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of
possibilities in which several kinds of conduct, several ways of reacting and
modes of behaviour are available.

(Foucault, 2003b:56)

This statement has been interpreted in a way that allows for the occurrence of agency
within the ‘field of possibilities’ permitted by the structures of power that have been
imposed upon the subject (Bevir, 1999; Hacking, 1985). However, it seems that this
interpretation runs contrary to the notion of Foucault’s constructed subject; if one acts
3
Potentiality is only distinguishable from materiality if it remains open to becoming and not becoming
simultaneously. Thus, being itself can be said to be perpetual potentiality (Agamben, 1999, 215).
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because one has been acted upon, the forces of power imprinted onto the subject’s
consciousness already predetermines action. Positive freedom—which upholds the
possibility of an autonomous will—therefore appears contrary to Foucault’s
understanding of constructed identities, as the notion of a universal reason would
require a transcultural cognitive mechanism undisturbed by the phenomena and
socialisation of the material world. Furthermore reason is a function of language and is
therefore embedded in the idiosyncrasies of syntax, dialect, and conditioned
perception, and thus embedded in and dependent on the forces that gave rise to it.
Negative freedom —in line with the subtraction mechanisms of power
aforementioned—requires desire on behalf of the subject to get from A to B and
therefore is still a movement derived from the structures of power that it wishes to
escape from. In short, if it is based in the material world it is enmeshed in it; any
manifestation can only emerge from that which already exists.

All this is not to invalidate the very tangible effects that have been enabled by
liberal notions of freedom and the belief in the autonomy of the subject, but just to
clarify the lack of neutrality in their emergence and therefore their function. In his
thought provoking book, The Great War for Civilisation: The Con- quest of the
Middle East, Robert Fisk uses the example of the British invasion of Iraq in 1917 to
illustrate the dangers inherent in the belief of a universal notion of liberty. Fisk quotes
General Stanley Maude: ‘Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as
conquerors or enemies, but as liberators’ (Fisk, 2005:172). Fisk then explains that
when the people of Fallujah tried to liberate themselves three years later, the British
destroyed the city (ibid.). Thus, ‘liberation’ is a subjective term. Prozorov reiterates
this, suggesting that liberation from the outside is paradoxical,

…not only because freedom is an experience that cannot be instituted through

declaration or legislation but also because this experience requires a re-
appropriation of sovereignty rather than the symbolic demolition of statues of
former sovereigns…To liberate the other is to assert sovereignty over its
existence and this assertion, however momentary in practice, plagues any
freedom granted to the other. If freedom consists in sovereignty over one’s
own existence, it logically follows that the object of liberation must also be its
subject.
(Prozorov, 2007:101)
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To liberate the other on the basis of declaration or legislation, is thus to control them.
Hence the only liberation possible is that of one’s own being. As we have seen, if
such a liberation were opposable, that is, open to comparison and potentially causative
of conflict, it would still involve a degree of choice and therefore could only have
been drawn from—either in agreement with or in reaction to—the epistemic
conditions within which it was formed. In other words, one seeking to liberate a self
that is caught up in an identity conceived of as an expression of interiorised
subjectivity, cannot be said to be seeking a Foucauldian freedom, because such a
positive affirmation of the self does not exist within a Foucauldian ontology. It is
equally clear that one cannot liberate the set of positive attributes that form the
externally created instrument of subjugation for which biopolitical functioning can be
held responsible, as it is the identity with this mode of existence that allows for the
proliferation of the subjection of the self.
This assessment of agency leaves little room for notions of freedom. It must
therefore be asked if the potential of freedom rests not upon the subject’s ability to
discern, but on the subject’s ability to detach. That is, could freedom arise from an
internalisation of the senses that allows for a detached witnessing of thought (a
product of historical conditioning), and sensation? In this sense, Descartes’
qualification of existence ‘I think therefore I am’ or Gadamer’s ‘we speak to each
other, therefore I am’ both leave the subject inadequately equipped for freedom as
they effectively confirm their existence through an acknowledgment that the self is
constructed through discourse. Therefore, if freedom from the historical self and the
inherent limits of language is possible, existence must be qualified by the sentence ‘I
know that I think, therefore I am’. It is the identification with that which observes
thought as opposed to the identification with thought itself that allows for the
possibility of freedom.
Deleuze’s interpretation of Foucault’s textual corpus appears to be in
agreement with such an ontological affirmation. Questioning the possibility of
freedom with respect to Foucauldian theorisations of power, he asks ‘how can we
cross the line’ from subjection to freedom? (G.Deleuze, 1988:95):

The History of Sexuality explicitly closes on a doubt. If at the end of it Foucault

finds himself in an impasse, that is not because of his conception of power itself
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but rather because he found the impasse to be where power places us, in both our
lives and our thoughts, as we run up against it in our smallest truths…The
classical age had already stated that there was an inside of thought, the unthought,
when it invoked the finite, the different orders of the infinite. And from the
nineteenth century on it is more the dimensions of finitude which fold the outside
and constitute a “depth”, a “denstity withdrawn into itself,” and inside of life,
labour, and language, in which man is embedded, if only to sleep, but conversely,
which is also itself embedded in man, “as a living being”
(ibid.:97)

It seems thus, that it is in the turning in on oneself that a self apart from external
sources can be found, and therefore, where freedom itself can be found, ‘in which a
sense of serenity would be finally attained and life truly affirmed’ (ibid:96). A
Foucauldian freedom cannot attach itself to any ideology, as such an attachment will
only manifest new orders of dominion and subjugation. It is the disidentification with
the external- which is reflected in our own thoughts and bodies-that will lead to
freedom. As David Couzens Hoy writes, it is the ‘practice of risking one’s deformation
as a subject by resistance not to the constraining principles per se, but to one’s
attachment to them insofar as they constitute one’s identity’ (Hoy, 2004:100). I would
therefore argue, that a Foucauldian freedom results from the refusal to conclude, and
the maintenance of a willing and continuous openness to the other. However, the other
is not just an external figure or culture, but the internalized otherness that exists as an
outcome of processes of socialization, and is thus contingent on the belief and
adoption of opposable realities presented by specific cultural discourses. In other
words, the categories that form our linguistically molded perceptions and the
judgments and opinions that emanate from them, construct the internal dialogue that
constitutes our histories and our smallest truths. Therefore, a Foucauldian concept of
freedom entails that such truths must not be seen as solid and ultimate, but as the
transient and hollow consequences of believing in what we have been told. For it is in
the acceptance of such tellings that moments are reduced to other moments, and the
inexhaustible flow of inspired temporality is reduced to a set of ideas held captive in
the semi-permanence of form. The subject is not free because he is trapped in time. He
is unwilling to succumb to the inevitable death of the ego, as he continuously struggles
to give cognitive meaning to his experience. And thus, in the freezing of his
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uniqueness and perception, freedom awaits outside the solid walls of constructed
identity.
It is clear then that questions of political theory are not relevant here as
Foucault does not ask: what political order provides the optimum environment under
which freedom can succeed? Instead, as Sergei Prozorov suggests, ‘Foucault’s
approach raises the following question: “Given the present conditions of subjection,
what are the possibilities of freedom available to us?”’ (Prozorov, 2007:5).
A text that claims to offer a freedom beyond the confines of linguistic
constraints and signified realities is The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

II. Patanjali’s freedom4

Any attempt to understand documents over two millennia old, is of course hugely
problematic. Thus, in agreement with Foucault’s notion of ‘discursive practices’
(Foucault, 1972:170), I acknowledge that the set of rules that determined truth values
in the spatio/temporal sphere that the Yoga Sutras were compiled, are highly unlikely
to correspond to today’s interpretive mechanisms. Moreover, it has been suggested
that to evade commentary without extensive training in Indian philosophy of the first
century would be affected by sectarian or other agendas (Bryant, 2009:xxxv).
Therefore, when attempting to understand Patanjali’s explicit notion of freedom, older
and relatively new commentaries will be used alongside modern day uses of the Yoga
Sutras methodology and its outcome, as a means of evidence to any interpretation
reached. However, Rama Prasada’s translation of Vyasa’s commentary of the
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras (1912) will be the main source used for this essay, as it is
thought that Vyasa produced the commentary within decades of the appearance of the
Yoga Sutras (White, 2014:6).

4
When attempting to unpack Patanjali’s notion of freedom, it should be mentioned that any such
taking is highly dependent upon the translations available. Though I have knowledge of Sanskrit
grammar, a selection of various commentaries and translations will be considered in order to formulate
as contextually rooted an understanding of freedom according to Patanjali as much as is possible.
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Patanjali’s Ashtanga Yoga

Though almost certainly not the inventor of yoga, it is thought that somewhere
between 200 BCE and 200CE Patanjali was the first to systematize and codify the
diverse set of practices known as yoga existing during that period. It was Patanjali’s
particular methodization that led to the eventual hypostatization of yoga as one of the
main schools of Indian philosophy (Bryant, 2009: xxxiii-xxxiv). Patanjali’s yoga is
often seen as going hand in hand with the Samkya school of philosophy, as the
metaphysical ground from which their philosophies and practices are drawn,
combined with a shared terminology, infer many similarities. Both schools recognize
the diversity of existence as emerging out of a singular elemental matter named
prakriti. Furthermore, both schools share the vocabulary of purusha (the Self) and
prakriti (matter), and the fundamental view that the attainment of liberation is
analogous with the extrication of the purusha from prakriti. Thus the Yoga Sutras lay
out a methodology that leads the practitioner from the enmeshment in ego to the
annihilation of ego, which results in the state of Kaivalya (independence). Ashtanga
translates as ‘eight limbs’,5 inferring that there are multiple and interrelated
approaches within this system, which are used simultaneously as a methodology to
refine concentration. The one-pointedness that the practitioner develops allows for the
meticulous examination of any material and mental phenomena in order to gain the
understanding that they are, as Richard Freeman explains, ‘composites of their
backgrounds and not anything separate or eternal’ (Freeman, 2010:3). Patanjali
suggests that this insight into the interwoven nature of material and mental existence
leads the practitioner to the deeper states of awareness that are said to free the
practitioner from the binds of conditioned existence. These states are known as
samadhi.

5
The eight limbs include: 1.yamas (abstinences); 2. niyamas (observances); 3. asana (posture); 4.
pranayama (control of life-force); 5. pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses); 6. dharana
(concentration); 7. dhyana (meditation); 8. samadhi (contemplation, absorption or super-conscious
state).
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Samadhi

The word samadhi stems from the amalgamation of ‘sam’ (together) and ‘dha’ (to
place, or to put), and therefore it can be translated as ‘to put’, or ‘to place together’.
When interpreted in the context of the Yoga Sutras, it suggests the unification of
subject and object, which as George Feuerstein explains is the basic ‘characteristic of
the mystical state of unification to which it refers’ (Feuerstein, 1987:8066). This is the
state Patanjali discusses when he affirms: ‘Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah’ (yoga is the
restraint of mental modifications). Patanjali suggests that it is when the five kleshas
(afflictions) are destroyed, that samadhi arises. The afflictions are: ignorance, egoism,
attachment, aversion, and clinging to life.6 Through the cultivation of one-pointedness
and the corresponding state of samadhi, the afflictions—those that result from the
conditioning of the subject—are destroyed, or cease to fluctuate.7 It is the
methodology laid out in Book II of the Yoga Sutras that leads to the development of
samadhi and the eventual reversal of the practitioners conditioning, so that ‘all
ignorance vanishes’.8 Ignorance is defined as ‘The taking of the non-eternal to be
eternal’9. Vyasa provides some examples, suggesting that the state of ignorance is
equal to, ‘the possession of such notions as that the earth is permanent, the firmament
with the moon and the stars is permanent, the gods are immortal’ (Vyasa, 1912:95).
However, particularly relevant to this essay, Vyasa continues to explain that
ignorance, is not in opposition to knowing as a cognitive function, since cognition of
any sort would still result in misperception, but it is that which is ‘possessed of
substantiality’ (Vyasa, 1912:98). That is, all forms of relative knowledge can be said
to be a form of ignorance; all preferences, likes and dislikes, attachments and
aversions, are for Patanjali, the result of man’s socialisation (Vivekananda, 1986:11).
Freedom for Patanjali must thus be unopposable, free from equality and inequality,
for it only arises when the five afflictions have been eradicated. Vyasa explains, for
example, that in the case of equality, if one of the two equals says with reference to a
common object of their attention,

6
II-3
7
II-11
8
II-5
9
II-5
18

…let this be new,’ and the other says, ‘let this be old,’ then one thing only
necessarily [is] happening, unrestrained fulfilment of the wish is interfered with,
and one becomes less than the other. Further it cannot be that two equals should
at once possess an object desired by both. Because the wishes are contradictory.
Hence he alone is Iswara, whose divinity is free from equality or excess’
(ibid.:42)

Therefore, the afflictions are equal to the duality of existence found in the binaries of
language, ‘their actions are good or bad’ (ibid.:41) they are enmeshed in cognition,
not potential but actualised. It is the state of samadhi that leads to the gnosis of a
unified reality beyond the relativity of binary perception, where the correlativity of
existence disappears, and subject and object merge. Patanjali explains:

Becoming like a transparent crystal all the modifications disappearing, (the mind
acquires) the power of thought transformation (samapatti),10 the power of
appearing in the shape of whatever object is presented to it, be it the knower, the
knowable or the act of knowing.11
(Vyasa, 1912:66)

The practitioner who has detached from the mental fluctuations of his mind- thus
rendering his conditioning powerless- no longer distinguishes between knower,
knowable, and knowledge. The mind has become completely absorbed in the object, or
the single vritti, on which he or she is focused.12 However, as Harold Coward points
out, though Patanjali is unconcerned with the object of meditative absorption, the
practitioner must eventually transcend even that, as the object still exists in the realm
of the symbolic, and can therefore only offer an incomplete experience of reality. Only
when the practitioner has transcended any perspective of a categorised universe does
he or she experience reality as it is and thus achieve liberation (Coward, 1979:331).
Therefore, it is necessary to consider the four states of object related samadhi that are

10
Samapatti is often used as a synonym for samadhi.
11
I:40
12
Patanjali appears to resist enmeshment in dogma by suggesting that the practitioner may cultivate
one-pointedness by ‘meditating according to one’s predilection’ (Vyasa, 1912). Patanjali suggests some
possible points of focus from the breath (I:34) to the state of painless lucidity (I:36), and eventually
proposes that he or she may choose anything they wish as an object for meditation. Thus, Patanjali
avoids judgments of hierarchy and cultural preferences (I:39).
19

said to lead to the state of complete transcendence (kaivalya) in order to further

understand Patanjali’s freedom.

The four states of ‘super consciousness’13

The four levels of samadhi are catalogued in correspondence to their rising level of
purity; the increasing subtlety in the gradations of awareness and contingent absence
of conditioned perception.
The first is referred to as Savitarka samadhi, or ‘indistinct’. Vyasa describes
this state: ‘There, the thought transformation in which the options of word, meaning
and idea are mixed up, is called indistinct’14 (Vyasa, 1912:69). Thus, Savitarka
samadhi is the least subtle and most ‘impure’ of the four states because the practitioner
is still entangled in the structuralist universe. That is, in this state the actual nature of
the object of concentration remains concealed, because the practitioner is still living
historically. He views the object through his conditioned perspective, and is unable to
distinguish between signifier, signified, and referent. As Vivekananda explains:

In these that are called “with reasoning,” [Savitarka] we keep the duality of
subject and object, which results from the mixture of word, meaning, and
knowledge. There is first the external vibration, the word; this carried inward by
the sense currents, is the meaning. After that there comes a reactionary wave in
the Chitta, [mind], which is knowledge, but the mixture of the three make up
what we call knowledge.
(Vivekananda, 1986:138)

As if caught in Wittgensteinian word games, the subject’s experience of reality is the

reflection of her history in her immediate perception; she is unable to separate her past
from the present. Experience is forever consigned to the repetition of learned cognition
and the consequential projections. This entwined reality, Patanjali refers to as
viparyayah (unreal cognition).15 It is a state of awareness grounded in vikalpa (verbal

13
A common translation of samadhi is ‘super consciousness’. For example, see: (Vivekananda, 1986)
14
I:42
15
I:8
20

delusion).16 However, though the practitioner’s perception is still obscured by the

mixing of word, knowledge, and object, in this first stage of samadhi she is able to
recognize this indistinct perception and thus arrest the process (Iyengar, 1996:94,
Vyasa, 1912:70). Savitarka samadhi is therefore signified by an increased awareness
of one’s samskaras (impulses of previous impressions) and the limitation of
knowledge derived from symbols.
Nirvitarka is the second state of samadhi.17 Here the understanding of one’s
conditioning moves beyond cognitive understanding and into the experiential. Thus
Feuerstein refers to it as ‘trans-cognitive’ (Feuerstein, 1987:8067). Other translations
include ‘non-argumentative’ (Vyasa, 1907), ‘without reasoning’ (Vivekananda, 1986),
‘wordless’ (Vyasa, 1912). Perhaps the most obviously relevant translation to this essay
is ‘non-argumentative’ as it infers that taking up a position is not part of this state of
being. Vyasa explains that the condition of nirvitarka samadhi,

…is free from all notions of verbal convention as well as from all modification of
knowledge due to valid testimony and inference,–then there appears the object in its own
real form, characterized by nothing but this form alone: and that condition is the “non-
argumentative.” This is the highest perception; and it is the root of valid testimony and
inference, both of these arising from it. Such a perception cannot be said to occur in the
company of knowledge due to assertion and inference. Therefore the perception of the
Yogi due to non-argumentative meditation, is unmixed with any kind of right notion…
(Vyasa, 1907: 38; emphasis added).

In this state, the practitioner has left the structuralist reality and thus entered an
awareness that is unaffected by his past knowledge of language. His perception is now
untainted by linguistically based -and therefore relative- knowledge. However, it is
only in the next two levels of samadhi (savichara and nirvichara), that the practitioner
is entirely free of form and thought. Such a level of concentration allows for the
practitioner to experience the microcosmic or atomic structure of the object (Coward,
1979:332). That is, the practitioner comes to an awareness of the very primal force that
constructs the materiality of the universe, known as prakriti. The objects of
concentration become more subtle with each level of samadhi until the adept is finally
able to perceive the material world as it is at its most fundamental level (Vyasa,

16
I: 6
17
I: 43
21

1912:78). Thus the knowledge gained from inference and testimony that is expressed
in symbols, is replaced by a knowing achieved through a merging of consciousness
with the subtlest aspect of manifestation.18 The limitations of the symbolic world are
well attested to in classical yoga. As Vivekananda writes, ‘scriptures cannot take us to
realisation. We can all read the Vedas, and yet will not realise anything, but when we
practice the teachings, then we attain to that state…which penetrates where reason
cannot go…and where the testimony of others cannot avail’ (Vivekananda, 1986:141).
The final level of samadhi (nivircara) related to object consciousness, takes the
practitioner further away from his conditioned existence. In this state, reality is
perceived without any distortion, it is, as Vysasa explains, ‘undisturbed’. (Vyasa,
1912:80). When the yogi achieves this essential cognition (ritambhara)19 as a result of
nivirchaka samadhi, all other impressions are destroyed and a return to necsience is no
longer possible.20 One is now a liberated being (jivanmukta).21 This freedom is, as
Vachaspati explains, beyond expression, because ‘there is no conventional denotation
of the particular in words…the relation of the sign and the thing signified is not found
existing between a word and the particular. Nor is such a particular possible of being
expressed by the meaning of a sentence (ibid.82). Thus, similarly to Foucault,
Patanjali’s notion of freedom is unopposable and beyond ideological constructions.
Certainly aspects of their ontological views on freedom appear to share some
commonalities. Perhaps greater clarity will be achieved by the consideration of their
suggested practices of liberation.

III. Askesis and Astanga Yoga as Practices of Liberation

Freedom in Practice

Having considered Patanjali’s theorisation of freedom, the question will now be posed:
how do (and can) Foucault’s and Patanjali’s conceptions compare? These questions
will be explored both through the already discussed conceptualisations of freedom, the

18
I: 49
19
I-48
20
I-50
21
IV-29 through IV-32
22

eight limbed practice that Patanjali suggests to attain liberation, and Foucault’s
suggested methodology of the care of the self.
As has been seen, the term biopower functions to decentralize locations from
which power is produced, and therefore challenges the notion of sovereignty as the
primary function and expression of power whilst also redistributing it. Foucault
therefore directly challenges the Marxist concept of top-down power: biopower ‘is in
every aspect the antithesis of that mechanism of power which the theory of
sovereignty described or sought to transcribe’ (Foucault, 1980:104). One group does
not possess power over another, ‘power is everywhere’ (Foucault, 1978:93).
Therefore, central to this notion of power, is an altered idea of resistance. Resistance
does not exist external to power but is embedded within it as part of its functioning
(Foucault, 1962; 1978; 1980). By highlighting this view of the dynamics of power,
Foucault has demonstrated how the proliferation of power and the abduction of the
subject into government rationalities can be implemented through discourses—such as
self-help—that claim to offer liberation from power. Thus, Foucault’s philosophies
can be disturbing, as they demand a revaluation of the concepts of freedom and
liberation, which often lead to understandings antithetical to notions of themselves as
an expression of will. For example, from a Foucauldian viewpoint, Western
democracy requires its citizens to be free, that is, in alignment with western liberal
notions of what freedom entails. As Prozorov writes:

When the National Security Strategy of the United States, which explicitly
authorises the preventative deployment of military force against “the enemies of
freedom”, refers to freedom and liberty more than a hundred times in its fifty
pages, it becomes increasingly difficult to speak about freedom outside the
context of its use as an instrument of authority.
(Prozorov, 2007:2)

Power emerges as disciplinary and normalising, as it imposes regulatory sanctions

readily accepted by democratic subjects convinced of their own status as free people.
Thus, liberal ideals of the continuous eradication of restrictive forms of domination are
disrupted, as more insidious and sinister forms of sovereignty emerge as internalised
systems of regulation. Furthermore, as has been seen (p.8-12), resistance to such
methods of control through introductions of alternative ideologies of freedom only
23

lead to the further enmeshment in some form of binary choice, and thus negation of
another’s freedom is inescapable. Again, Prozorov provides a useful example:

From the Bolshevik Revolution to the contemporary American “crusade” for

freedom in the Middle East we observe the dire consequences of taking upon
oneself the honourable duty of liberating others…To liberate is to master; thus,
the only being that can be genuinely liberated without inviting a lethal
contradiction is one’s own.
(Prozorov, 2007:101, emphasis added)

I am not suggesting that Foucault considers notions of negative freedom completely

ineffective to freedom’s cause; in fact, he explicitly instructs that we ‘can and must
question those who govern’ (Foucault, 1988a:51-52). However, Foucault also states
that ‘this act of liberation is not sufficient to establish the practice of liberty’ (Foucault,
1988a:2-3).
What then, is a sufficient practice of liberty for Foucault? Vikki Bell suggests
that for Foucault, ‘freedom does not rest on a subject that desires and designs a
particular future, but one who is engaged in the present because s/he is open to the
future as unknown’ (Bell, 1996:91). Drawing from Foucault’s ‘aesthetics of existence’
(Foucault, 1988a), Bell explains that Foucault moves away from freedom as an
expression of will to ‘the space between self and self that is now politicized as
freedom’ (Bell, 1996:96). She suggests that Foucault ties the practice of freedom to the
present moment in order to provide the space necessary for the subject to consider
freedom outside of the current political model (ibid.). That is, an increase in reflexivity
is essential if one is to obtain the space necessary to observe the conditioning of her
own psychology; the truths that have come together in the formation of her
perspective. As Foucault writes:

…the problem for the subject or the individual soul is to turn its gaze upon itself,
to recognize itself in what it is and, recognising itself in what it is, to recall the
truths that issue from it and that it has been able to contemplate.
(Foucault, 2003a:29)
24

A Foucauldian practice of freedom therefore disallows for the use of discourse as a

means for liberation and consequently avoids the ‘lethal contradiction’ that Prozorov
warns against. Such a practice observes the discourses that have led to the construction
of the individual’s opposable reality but does not identify with them as absolute, as to
do so would be to negate the present moment and the recognition of ‘itself in what it
is’.
One way that the eight limbs exposes the effects of such discourses on the
subject is through the reflection on the first two limbs: yama and niyama of ashtanga
yoga.22 Patanjali does not command the implementation or the acceptance of these ten
ethical principles, but rather asks the practitioner to consider and comprehend how
these notions are embodied. As B. K. S Iyengar explains in his commentary on the
yamas and niyamas, ‘True ethics are not absorbed from outside conditioning’ (Iyengar,
2005:250). The yamas and niyamas serve as a methodology in which one can ‘get to
know oneself better’, and a way in which the student of yoga can, through reflection
on them, observe the effects of discourse/power on their mind/body.
Amy Tate and Laura Douglass provide us with a case study in which we can
observe how the aforementioned processes are employed in order to ‘encourage
students to explore their own bodily experiences of power, gender, class, race and
sexuality’ (Tate and Douglass, 2010:2). During the course (Scholars of the body:
Yoga as a tool for teaching and learning within higher education), students explore
how the yamas and niyamas are both experienced as bodily expressions and as
heavily influenced by their particular socialisation. For example, through the
introversion of awareness (pratyahara)—the fifth limb—they explore the concept of
non-violence (ahimsa)—the first of the yamas—and its counterpart, violence (himsa).
Through embodied investigation the students of the course discover that the urge to be
violent is not solely abstraction, but is felt as tangible physical sensations:

Violence has a feeling: tightness, constriction in the throat, tightness in the

abdomen, an urge for movement. The absence of violence (ahimsa) is also
accompanied by concrete physiological sensations. Every culture habituates its
people to acceptable levels of violence and non-violence, which are present both
as an “idea” and as specific holding patterns within the body.

22
The yamas include: Ahimsa (non-violence), Satya, (truth); Asteya, (non-stealing); Brahmcharaya,
(continence); Apigraha, (non-greed). The niyamas include: Sauca (purity); Santosa (contentment);
Tapas (austerity); svadhyaya (self-study); Isvarapranidhana (surrender to Isvara).
25

(Tate and Douglass, 2010:5)

The postures of yoga (asana) - the third limb - are encouraged by Patanjali to be
practiced in a manner that is steady, comfortable, and free from violence (sthira
sukham asanam).23 Thus, through the practice of asana, practitioners of yoga are able
to discover the habitual patterns of physical tension in their mind/body. Through the
development of a non-violent attitude toward their observations a certain level of
detachment is cultivated, and consequently, the control exuded by cultural
conditioning loses its power:

Once students have some understanding of how their own embodiment is a

source of power which is neither negative nor positive, but exists in
relationship to history and culture, they often make impressive discoveries.
One student noticed that some of the qualities expressed in the yamas and
niyamas happen naturally in a society that is not oppressive. She noted that in a
society in which all members have basic needs met there is less impulse to
steal (asteya) or to be violent (ahimsa); in a society in which sexuality is
celebrated there is natural sexual restraint in an effort to preserve the sanctity
of sexual union (brahmacharya).

(Tate and Douglass, 2010:5-6)

Though the above observations may be somewhat romanticizing, they clearly

demonstrate how through the practice of the eight limbs and the body-centred self-
investigation it promotes, practitioners of Patanjali’s system of yoga might come to
understand the effects of power in terms of internal regulation, social control, and
resistance. In exploring the relationship between corporeality and specific socio-
cultural contexts, the possibility of an embodied feeling of freedom arises as ‘a space
between the self and the self’; a freedom from the discourses that have claimed truth
as their own, and convinced the subject that such truths are theirs also; a movement
toward the reclamation of the freedom that has been subsumed by ideological
formations. Lakoff and Johnson explain:

Embodied truth requires us to give up the illusion that there exists a unique
correct description of any situation. Because of the multiple levels of our

23
II-46
26

embodiment, there is no one level at which one can express all the truths we can
know about a given subject matter. But even if there is no one correct description,
there can still be many correct descriptions, depending on our embodied
understandings at different levels or from different perspectives.
(Lakoff and Johnson, 1999:109)

Such an embodied truth requires a full emersion of the subject into the present, it is in
a sense, choosing to feel and observe as opposed to think one’s way through life. The
truths offered from the fluidity of feeling inevitably contrast with the static concepts
found in verbal thought. Thus, one is led to question the impermanence of the
linguistic personality and the limitations of the socially constructed self, which
Foucault understood as essential for the governmentation of the self; the development
of one’s ethos24as ‘good, beautiful, honourable estimable, memorable and exemplary’
(Foucault, 2003a:29).
In order to provide a practice that would help the subject to arrive at such an
ethos, Foucault drew on the ancient Greeks notion of askesis. Foucault proposed that
many of the ancient Greek texts suggested an awareness of power relations and the
desire to free oneself from the socialised truths embedded in one’s consciousness. In
the Technologies of the Self Foucault revives askesis as a practice of freedom. He
speculates that the principal features of askesis include ‘exercises where the subject
puts himself in a situation in which he can verify whether he can confront events and
use the discourses with which he is armed’ (Foucault, 1988:239). Meditation and self-
writing provide techniques that allow the practitioner to observe what she is and what
she is not, and thus observe her relationship with the world and the way it has formed
her from a distance. If one knows how relations of power have acted upon him, he is
able to accept or reject them. These practices provide a window in which one may
explore their ontology and thus their freedom. Foucault makes this perfectly clear
when he writes:

…if you take proper care of yourself, that is, if you know ontologically what you
are, if you know what you are capable of, if you know what it means for you to
be a citizen of a city, to be the master of a household in an oikos [ancient Greek
household] if you know what things you must fear and those that you should not

24
Personal philosophy of ethics
27

fear if you know what is suitable to hope for, and what are the things on the
contrary which should be completely indifferent to you, if you know finally that
you should not fear death, well, then, you cannot abuse your power…
(Foucault, 2003a:31)

Foucault and Patanjali both understood that desires were constraining to freedom. Desires
were, in effect, power relations at work on the unconscious subject. Thus, contrary to
instinct, freedom is not the fulfilment of desire, to go and do what one pleases, because it
is not the subject that pleases but the unconscious voices of his interior formation. As
Patanjali writes: ‘Desirelessness is the consciousness of supremacy in him who is free
from thirst for perceptible and scriptural enjoyments’.25 Perhaps we should allow Foucault
to provide the commentary for this sutra:

In meditation…the subject passes from darkness to light, from impurity to

purity, from the constraint of passions to detachment, from uncertainty and
disorded movements to the serenity of wisdom…liberating him from his
convictions…freeing him from his attachments or immediate certainties.
(Foucault, 1998:406)

Conclusion

The discourse of a liberated self—whether it be in reference to a true sexuality, human

nature, or an eternal soul—can be seen as both a distraction from the issue at hand,
which is freedom from the ties that bind, the matters of materiality and the very
tangible abduction of biopolitical institutions, or as a method to reverse the
socialisation of the subject, and thus introduce the neutrality of perpetual potentiality
back into the subjects ontological experience. Thus, the answer may not lie in either of
these two options but in a combination of both. ‘Be in the world but not of it’ springs
to mind. The ability to remain neutral and detached from experience for which an
experience of the liberated self is said to require, does not inherently disallow for
participation in social action. Both internal and external elements are at work here: the
internal is that which requires the detachment and the external is that which requires

25
I:15
28

action, and importantly both can be achieved simultaneously. In fact, as Foucault and
Patanjali demonstrate, if freedom is to be maintained in society the effects of society
on the subject must be illuminated through a process of introspection. To be active in
a process of social resistance without detachment to the outcome of one’s efforts is to
remain enmeshed in the duality of disagreement and therefore the space of potentiality
evaporates with time-bound opinion, as opinion is equal to ideology, and ideology to
conditioned existence. This is because ideologies are only made possible through the
use of, and the resistance to, the very constructs that keep one from freedom. For, it is
these constructs that create and maintain the historical and possible universes of the
human mind. That is, they cause the mind to be trapped in time. To remain in a state of
potentiality means to stay present to one’s immediate experience, and therefore
without any interpretive function, and thus without judgement or mental commentary,
because any mental commentary is simply history presented as the ahistorical;
prejudice and the repetition of prejudice displayed as novelty.
It is clear that both Foucault and Patanjali suggest freedom lies in the
internalisation of one’s awareness in order for the subject to observe the happenings of
the present moment and the effects of power on the interiorised self. Through the
practice of presence, observations emerge of the linguistically constructed self as
impermanent and fragile, and the convictions necessary to sustain notions of a
solidified identity are challenged. As Bell explains, a Foucauldian freedom ‘cannot be
carried over in the way that opinion can’ because ‘it needs the space of time’ (Bell,
1996: 86). Only a partial freedom can be found in the realm of the symbolic, as the
symbolic is trapped in time. Beliefs, concepts, ideas, analysis, predications,
reminiscence, etc., all are abstractions drawn from a single moment. All contribute to
the truths and ideologies that are the building blocks of the fabricated self, and are thus
vulnerable to the manipulation and control of biopolitics. When these ideologies are
expressed they take the undivided experience of corporeality and make it relative and
therefore opposable. History is superimposed onto actuality, and the subject is forced
into the repetition of past experience as he reiterates-in some form-the knowledge
provided and limited by the particularities of his cultural epistemology. It thus follows,
that for a Foucauldian freedom to truly manifest it must not manifest at all, but
undergo an infinity of deaths until there is no life and death remaining, only the
uninterrupted flow of observation free from interpretive cognition. One could perhaps
suggest that this state is reflected in Wittgenstein’s famous words: ‘Don’t think, but
29

look!’ (Wittgenstein, 1958:66). Or perhaps more relevantly, in Patanjali’s second

Sutra: ‘Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah’ (yoga is the restraint of mental modifications).
I do not mean to force the coherence of Foucault, or to coerce his thought to
meet Patanjali’s demand, but to highlight that, to a demonstrable degree their
realisations are not entirely incompatible. It is at least clear that both philosophers
understand the structures of personality as exogenous, and thus freedom must consist
of a release from constructed notions of gender, sex, and race, etc.; release from the
historical self. As Louis McNay suggests, Foucault’s ethics ‘privileges a notion of the
self establishing a relationship with the self, rather than understanding the self as
embedded in and formed through types of social interaction’ (McNay, 1992:164).26
And as Vivekananda suggests, Patanjali ‘teaches that desires and wants are in man,
that the power of supply is also in man; and that wherever and whenever a desire, a
want, a prayer, has been fulfilled, it was out of this infinite magazine that the supply
came, and not from any supernatural being’ (Vivekananda, 1986:viii). Foucault and
Patanjali insist there is no power acting on man’s material form-only that of nature and
other men. Furthermore, for both thinkers, there is no freedom expressed that does not
contest its own status as free. Therefore, their concepts of freedom, which exist outside
of any kind of right notion, are not vulnerable to the abduction of government
rationalities. The yogi looks inside for understanding making the yogic journey one of
increasing reflexivity, thus opposing the acceptance of belief systems external to one’s
own experience. It is, as Vivekananda explains, an internal science:

The best guide in life is strength. In religion, as in everything else, discard

everything that weakens you, have nothing to do with it. All mystery-mongering
weakens the human brain. Through it this science of yoga has been nigh
destroyed, but it is really one of the grandest of sciences…It is wrong to blindly
believe…you must practice and see whether these things happen or not.
(Vivekananda 1986:12)

An abandonment and replacement of current notions of freedom expressed through

will presupposes the ability to distance oneself from the freedom one is already
conditioned to believe in; it requires ‘the space between the self and the self’. As has

26
This leads McNay to suggest that Foucault’s strategies are inadequate to deal with the biopolitical
forms of control on which he has elaborated. Yet, without the possibility of observing the effects of
biopower, how can it ever be challenged?
30

been seen, Patanjali and Foucault claim that such a distance from the discourse of
one’s socialisation is a possibility, and both offer methodologies to achieve that
distance. It may therefore be suggested that Patanjali’s notion of oppression and
freedom may well be in alignment with Foucault’s. Oppression for both philosophers
is conceived of as manifesting through internalised processes that can only be
confronted through introspection—askesis or ashtanga yoga. Patanjali suggests the
practice of savitarka samadhi, Foucault suggests the methods of self writing and
meditation. Through the internalization of one’s awareness, Patanjali and Foucault
offer systematic methodologies in which the individual can confront his/her patterns of
conditioning (samskaras)/discourses of truth, and thus affirm a viable form of
sovereign subjectivity and move towards forms of freedom that cannot be appropriated
by any given or adopted identities.
31