Faith And Redemption - Research On Shi Tiesheng 's Thought

Shi Tiesheng is an outstanding thinker in writers, and his ideas had clear and consistent themes. About individual life, Shi Tiesheng explored fate, death and loneliness, which was based on the understanding of three fundamental living difficulties containing impermanent fate, death and inescapable loneliness. And love saves the loneliness, thus loneliness and love get the reactions; on the social and political level,Shi Tiesheng elucidated the humanism; and the Christian view of God as the core belief in Shi Tiesheng’s later writing reflected his practical concerning about social and political problems. These themes pointed to the origin of life and the fundamental issues of social and national development, which are connected by "faith and redemption " as a main line from the aspects of individual redemption and group redemption.This paper consists of the introduction, six chapters,a supplement and conclusion. Introduction is divided into three parts. The first part explores the theoretical and practical significance of Shi Tiesheng’s thoughts from the perspective of faith; t he second part summarizes the local and foreign researches about Shi Tiesheng and introduces three aspects of this paper’s innovation; the third part statemen ts the logic structure and the train of thoughts in this paper.The first chapter is entitled "loving fate –Shi Tiesheng’s view of fate". Based on his painful body situation, this chapter points out that his early sincere writing without hopeless is significant, which shows that a person dare to face the traged y of life, and illustrates meanings of the ontology of despair in relation of Tillic h’s thoughts, then points out the acceptance of despair itself is belief – which re flects the courage of existence, but these preliminary rational explorations about the fate had no a philosopher’s detached rational temperament. Shi Tiesheng’s f urther exploration was inspired by Job’s story in the Bible, thus realized one typ e of metaphysics relating to the universe as a whole and an distinct part. From this, he demonstrated the inevitable rationality of Human suffering, and expound s a more relieved attitude to face the fate. This chapter also puts forward two reflections based on his metaphysical presupposition and deduction about suffering i ssues.The second chapter is entitled "the meaning and eternity-- Shi Tiesheng’s philosophy of death". In "My Dancing"(1986), Shi Tiesheng firstly launched the rational exploration of death. But he denied absolute nothingness and furtherly denied death is nothing, thus derived "I" won’t die, which was just a self consistent logic but without enough validity. In his representative works such as the "Bing Xi Sui Bi", his discussions got rid of logical abstraction and had a more specific meaning. He focused on the "I" and provided the following ideas: one was "without me" of Buddhist concept; one was putting forward the "ego" into "I" which was based on the conception of universe and history according to a hierarchical sequence, but this idea made a circular argument between the eternity and significance; however, Shi Tiesheng’s subsequent works with analyses on the new cognition about significance and eternity enlightened us to realize that "I" won’t die and the eternal "I" were based on the moral cognition of life meaning. The eternity pointed to the matter of essence rather amount, and it was the eternal spirit of personality rather than the biological meaning of the infinite, which proved the validity of the thought of redemption. Shi Tiesheng believed that the "I" won’t die because he believed that people have the soul and the soul is deathless, and he provided a few empirical ideas; at the same time, he also demonstrated the importance of belief on the immortal soul from the moral sense. Love and knowledge should become the most basic and important themes, which was the inspiration provided by Shi Tiesheng’s philosophy of the death for us.The third chapter is entitled "loneliness and redemption of love-- Shi Tiesheng’s love view". Loneliness has duality to people, it also reflects the duality of human nature: on the one hand, people need to get out of loneliness, towards the community; on the other hand, people also need to confirm his uniqueness, so people eager to internal loneliness. Shi Tiesheng stressed that the first aspect, but ignored the second, which was the fundamental reason he was in trouble in the discussion on loneliness and love. Based on his life circumstances, he realized the disability and love were the two most essential humanity passwords which was the metaphor God gives to human. In the sense of loneliness, disability refers to oppression and damage on heart caused by human’s defense and discrimination. His exploration all expressed a strong desire to eliminate defense and discrimination against the world. Nevertheless, it was accompanied with the pessimistic recognition that loneliness was the human fate. Onthis basis, he pointed out that only love could save the loneliness. Based on salvation towards human loneliness, his love pointed to fraternity, but is difficult to achieve the fraternity, love is one of the parts can be realized. Thus he expressed the desire to eliminate loneliness through the discussion of love. But the ideal vision of love pointed to fraternity, then it was in a problem of "love could n vs. n". In "Love Problem", "Idealogical Notes", "My Trip as Ding Yi" to explore the topic of successive advance, but failed to draw a convincing answer.The last part reviews Shi Tiesheng’s thoughts with the view of Fromm, points out the cause of the trouble in love problems, and puts forward the solution.The fourth chapter is entitled "God and Politics-- Shi Tiesheng’s humanism". For Shi Tiesheng, the social and political level was concerned with his humanitarian ideas as the core. From the "traitor dilemma" and "our position", he saw the humanitarian meaning, analyzed the humanitarian freedom, equality, fraternity in depth associated with Christ culture and Christ spirit. In his opinion, political issues and "God" belief were inseparable, "God" and "destiny" were beyond humanity. Only standing on the height of the faith, can really hit the mark, to find a way out.The fifth chapter is entitled "belief because of invisibility-- Shi Tiesheng’s concept of God(a)". He expressed his understanding of faith based on the concept of God. His belief aroused our thinking mainly from two aspects: One is the epistemology, he stressed "belief because of invisibility", which emphasized the irrational characteristics of faith, which this chapter is to elaborate. The other stressed the eternal distance between human and God, which is discussed in the next chapter. In Shi Tiesheng’s works, there were always two kinds of God: one is the creator, the other is a savior. The creator appeared in the early stage, and in the later period, the image and spiritual of savior was particularly emphasized. This embodied his personal appreciation to Christian spirit and Christian culture. Based on Christian tritheism, Shi Tiesheng realized that the creator’s kindness behind indifference through saviors, So to find the human’s freedom in the fettered destiny. And thus he expounded the meaning of faith. But the existence of God which is also called the ontology of the God can not be avoided, but did not cause Shi Tiesheng special attention. He simply pointed out that the original meaning of faith was "belief because of invisibility". Because faith is the confidence and belief of human, once it is empirical, there would be no faith. At the same time, the limited rationality also makes it impossible to demonstrate faith. In his works, God is presented through the pro and con ideas: thepro thinking is, by the limited knowledge of human, the infinite is realized. And this infinite being, refers to God. The reverse thinking is based on the significance of salvation that he stressed the necessity and value of the existence of God. But the two ideas only set up the possibility of the existence of God and God’s value, thus did not yet established its authenticity. However, it is not to establish the truth of God in mind, some people can not really approached the belief in God. But it can not be proved the authenticity of God, inspired by the modern Christian thinker John Hick, we transform the soundness of inference about the existence of God to the study of the rationality about the faith of God of Shi Tiesheng. In this study, we saw an expanded experience and rational category. It is in this broad sense and experience, Shi Tiesheng’s belief in God has rationality, also provides enlightenment for us to approach God faith.The sixth chapter is entitled "The hypothesis of distance between human and God-- Shi Tiesheng’s view of God(b)". Including the objective understanding of limited manpower, it is more mainly based on the understanding on the evil of human nature and China’s history, culture and reality. Shi Tiesheng, in the sense of salvation, highlighted the eternal distance between human and God. T he distance between human and God is specifically embodied in the contrast, b etween the limited human power, human nature, human intelligence and the Go d Almighty, absolute perfection and goodness. Shi Tiesheng pointed out that "th e hypothesis of distance between human and God" was the answer found from "The Truth on The Cross" of Liu Xiaofeng. His thought was indeed associate d Carle Barth’s thought Liu Xiaofeng extremely respected. But with the compar ison of Carle Barth can be found that, Carle Barth’s extreme isolation theory b elittled human infinitely, completely dismantled human subjectivity. Shi Tieshen g set up the dialectic of human’s freedom through the dialectical discussion ab out Limited(person) and infinite(God) under the "The hypothesis of distance between human and God". At the same time, based on the social reality, we c ompares Shi Tiesheng’s "The hypothesis of distance between human and God" with Berdyaev’s individual personality freedom as the core idea, and think abo ut such question: which is the root cause of the problem, the totalitarian cultur e or the person’s servility consciousness? At last, we put forward further think ing on that Shi Tiesheng is an atheist or a pantheistic on atheistic sense. Fromthe perspective of epistemology, we cannot make accurate judgments whether Shi Tiesheng believed in God, but based on the perspective of redemption, and his own clear interpretation, we could give Shi Tiesheng an accurate name. He was a believer on religious spirit, which is also the consensus of scholars. An d we outline his religious spirit from five aspects.The supplement is Shi Tiesheng’s Buddhist ideas, and his exploration about the belief is in contrast between the Christian and Buddhism, but the latter is often to be used as counterexamples. But in general, Buddhism criticized by Shi Tiesheng is not the Buddhism in original sense, but a secular, utilitarian folk belief, thus his criticism of Buddhism is unfair, which is necessary to point out. According to Shi Tiesheng’s treatment logic, this chapter should be put in the two chapters about God, but will destroy the logic and the balance of the structure of those two chapters, so it is put as a supplement. According to Shi Tiesheng’s conception of belief, he critiqued Buddhism’s rationalism, utility and the conception of “extinguishing desires”. However, in his works, we can see the connection between his spirit and Mahayana Buddhism, and Shi Tiesheng ever clearly expressed his admiration to Mahayana Buddhism. From the perspective of Mahayana Buddhism, we can achieve the active understanding of Buddhism, which can responds to Shi Tiesheng questions on Buddhism.The conclusion is titled "unfinished-- literary writing on thoughts". This chapter m ainly focused on the relationship between thoughts and literary writing. In contra st to Kundera and Dostoevsky, this chapter points out that Shi Tiesheng’s artistic exploration is still unfinished in how to better deal with the relationship betwe en thoughts and literary writing, and we should continue to think about this iss ue.