Perspectives and Commitments

¶ … Socrates, "The unexamined life is not worth living (rdg.uk)." It is for this reason that a critical examination of our most fundamental beliefs about truth and reality whether right or wrong becomes an important undertaking (rdg.uk). The examination of major life perspectives challenges as well as helps us to better establish many of our own assumptions about life (rdg.uk).

We should all be concerned with how different views of the world clash or fit together, and with how the different perspectives (moral, scientific, religious, metaphysical, and personal) may be reconciled (rdg.uk). It is with these ideas in mind that this paper undertakes an examination of three major life perspectives, those of: naturalism, humanism, and theism (rdg.uk). According to naturalism, heredity and environment influence and determine human motivation and behavior (naturalism.html).

Thus, if an artist wishes to depict life as it really is, he or she must be rigorously deterministic in the representation of thoughts and actions (naturalism.html). Naturalism holds that all phenomena can be explained mechanistically in terms of natural (as opposed to supernatural) causes and laws (skepdic.com). Naturalism neither denies nor affirms the existence of God (skepdic.com). However, naturalism makes God an unnecessary hypothesis and essentially superfluous to scientific investigation (skepdic.com).

It states, the scope of science is limited to explanation of empirical phenomena without reference to forces, powers, influences, etc., which are supernatural (skepdic.com). Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect who was a pioneer in modern style and is the quintessential example of a naturalism partisan (frank_ll.htm). Organic (natural) architecture was a philosophy created by Wright (Frank_ll.htm). It means that a building should be developed out of its natural surroundings (Frank_ll.htm).

The particular function of the building, it's environment, and the type of materials employed in the structure should be the things that ultimately determined the architectural form is what Wright believed (Frank_ll.htm). One of the many fundamental contributions was the use of building materials for their natural colors as well as structural characteristics (Frank_ll.htm). Wright wrote a book entitled, "The Natural House," in 1954, which emphasized his views surrounding naturalism (Frank_ll.htm). Humanism is an approach to life emphasizing ethics, rationality, and intelligent compassion (etla.net).

Humanism asserts that reason and science are the soundest means for investigating claims of truth (etla.net). This philosophy asserts that ideas, values, myths, and social systems are based on human experience (etla.net). Free thought thrive best in free, democratic societies (etla.net). This is a doctrine centered on human interests or values (asmilan.org). Albert Camus was an example of a humanist thinker.

According to Camus, accepting the absurdity (life as a hopeless, meaningless, eternal up-hill struggle) is the first necessary step; it arouses a revolt, the analysis of, which can help us discover ideas capable of restoring relative meaning to existence (asmilan.org). After 1945, he was concerned with the study of the problems of action and of the service of humanity (asmilan.org). He believed that natural suffering increases not because men.