Dr. Vallicella quotes and comments on some excerpts from Julius Evola's The Doctrine of Awakening as he [Evola] attacks the oft-posed question, "Is Buddhism a religion?"
I find the question itself, framed in a binary, yes/no way, to be misleading by its very nature. Buddhism, if we respect it, is a living phenomenon with many aspects and dimensions. Reducing it to a set of doctrines and/or principles merely allows one to assume what one is trying to prove: a person convinced that "true" or "pure" or "essential" Buddhism is only a philosophy can strip away all the sociological, folkloric, magical, and theistic components of the tradition and conclude, that, yes, when stripped down to its philosophies, Buddhism is only a philosophy. This move merely thrusts one into a circular, tautological loop because the person is assuming the very thing he wishes to prove. Of course Buddhism, seen purely as a philosophy, is a philosophy!
It's funny, too, because Vallicella has long been partial to stripping religions down to their philosophical doctrines. He and I had a disagreement, years ago, about my praxis-oriented view that "religions are as they are practiced," i.e., they constitute dimensional, Habermasian "life-worlds" (Lebenswelten) that are so much more than their philosophical (or doctrinal) substrata. My contention, which is admittedly rooted in my bias toward empiricism, is that a religion is a religion when it's lived. Vallicella, perhaps revealing his own biases as a philosopher, is content to essentialize, to boil a religion down to its philosophical components and to explore those components' internal coherence. That's fine, as far as such exploration goes, but that path of inquiry also strips the humanity out of religion. You can tell only so much about an animal by studying its dried, chemical-bleached skeleton.
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