Dialectical Materialism

Dialectical Materialism (변증법적 유물론): The Conceptual Limits of the Philosophy of Struggle in Unification Thought

변증법적 유물론 · 辨證法的 唯物論 · Diamat, The Philosophy of Struggle

What Is Dialectical Materialism?

Dialectical materialism is the Marxist philosophy of reality holding that matter is primary and mind derivative, that all development proceeds through internal contradiction and struggle, and that there is no God, no purpose, and no fixed human nature—only matter in dialectical motion.

It is the ontology and epistemology on which historical materialism, the Marxist theory of society, is built, welding Ludwig Feuerbach’s materialism to G. W. F. Hegel’s dialectic.

Against it, the Exposition of the Divine Principle (EDP) sets a cosmos whose energy is not contradiction but give-and-take action centered on purpose.

I argue that the Unification critique turns on a single diagnosis: dialectical materialism mistakes a fallen condition—conflict—for the law of being itself, and its logic, its metaphysics, and its providential meaning are all expressions of that one error.

The reading defended below is that the system fails at three levels at once, and that the decisive move is not to dispute its political conclusions but to deny that struggle is original to reality.

Thesis-antithesis logic is the devil’s ruse for shattering God’s ideal

— Sun Myung Moon (“정분합과 정반합” / Jeongbunhap-gwa Jeongbanhap, 08/04/2001; vol. 350, sermon 3) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Translation from the Korean original (vol. 350, sermon 3, delivered August 4, 2001).

The judgment is severe by design. The dialectical triad is named not as a mistaken theory but as a stratagem of the adversary because the tradition reads the universalizing of conflict as the institutionalization of a primordial deviation.

What follows sets out the system on its terms, then weighs the Unification objections, marking where they are decisive and where they carry a burden.

Methodology Note

This study reads the Exposition of the Divine Principle (1996), the Cheon Seong Gyeong (CSG) English compilation held in project knowledge, and Unification Thought (Sang Hun Lee)—the systematic philosophy of the movement, accessed at uthought.org and in the older chapter texts—together with four addresses by Rev. Sun Myung Moon verified against the local Korean speech archive (volumes 168, 350, 354, and 486) and the primary works of Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, and Lenin in their editions. The canonical and systematic texts are read as authoritative within the tradition; the critiqued philosophers are stated first on their terms; the aim is doctrinal clarification, not external evaluation. The study refutes dialectical materialism as a metaphysics and does not claim thereby to overturn every empirical observation of historical materialism as social analysis. Archive addresses are quoted in the author’s translation with the verified date and Korean title; the single CSG passage is quoted from the compilation by the date it supplies.

The System Rests on Three Pillars—What Dialectical Materialism Claims

This section sets out the doctrine accurately because a critique is only as strong as the version of its opponent it can state.

From Hegel (Science of Logic, 1816), the system inherits the dialectic: the claim that reality develops through internal contradiction. Hegel’s own vocabulary is “determinate negation” and “sublation” (Aufhebung), in which a concept contains its negation and is carried up into a higher unity; the schoolbook triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is a later schematization fixed by Heinrich Chalybäus in 1837 (Chalybäus 1837).

Hegel was an idealist: the subject of this development was Absolute Spirit. From Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity, 1841), the system inherits materialism and the reduction of religion to a human projection, the thesis that “theology is anthropology” (Feuerbach 1841).

Marx fused the two (Marx 1859; 1867). He kept the dialectic but, in his image, turned it right side up, replacing Absolute Spirit with matter, so that it is not consciousness that determines being but social being that determines consciousness.

Applied to society, this becomes historical materialism, in which the productive forces and the relations of production fall into contradiction and the engine of history is class struggle.

Engels codified the metaphysics into three laws—the transformation of quantity into quality, the interpenetration of opposites, and the negation of the negation (Engels 1878).

Lenin added the reflection theory of knowledge, cognition as the mind copying an external material world, and named the inner principle of the method the “unity of struggle and opposition” (Lenin 1909).

Three commitments hold the system together: matter is primary and mind derivative; all development proceeds through contradiction and struggle; and there is no God, no purpose, and no fixed human nature. It is precisely these three pillars that the Unification critique targets, and it targets them not one by one but from a single counter-premise.

The Single Premise That Reverses Every Pillar

This section establishes that the Unification answer is generated from one ontological claim, not assembled piecemeal.

According to the Principle of Creation, every existing thing comes into being and develops through give-and-take action (수수작용) within an origin-division-union action (정분합작용): a unified origin projects a subject partner and an object partner, which interact around a common purpose and unite, establishing a four-position foundation (EDP 1996, 35–37).

The energy of the cosmos, on this account, is reciprocal exchange centered on purpose—not contradiction.

This single premise reverses every pillar of dialectical materialism at once. Where the system makes matter primary, the Principle makes a personal God of harmonized dual characteristics the Origin.

Where the system makes the law of development a struggle, the Principle makes purpose-centered give-and-take the law.

Where the system denies direction and finality, the Principle makes purpose intrinsic to every being. The fuller anatomy of this counter-system belongs to the companion entry Jeong-Bun-Hap; the present study concentrates on the demolition of the opposing one.

The Dialectic Mistakes the Fall for the Law of Being

This section establishes the keystone of the critique: the dialectician has observed a real phenomenon, conflict, and wrongly elevated it from a fallen condition into a law of being.

Rev. Moon grants that mind and body, and human beings generally, are in fact at war; he denies that this war is original or natural. In the Cheon Seong Gyeong, he names Marx and Hegel directly, observing that they took the struggle of mind and body for the basic constitution of humanity and did not know that it followed from the Fall.

From this, he draws the conclusion that frames the whole critique.

This is where the concept of struggle originated

— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, December 27, 1992) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Translation from the Korean compilation; official English edition not verified at the primary-source level.

The argument is structurally decisive within the Unification frame because it dissolves the claim at its root rather than disputing its applications.

If conflict is the residue of a primordial deviation rather than the constitution of reality, then a philosophy that universalizes conflict has mistaken a symptom for an anatomy, and any politics built upon it—the demand for permanent class struggle—is the institutionalization of a disease.

This is why True Father’s term for the dialectical triad is a ruse of the adversary rather than a mistaken hypothesis: the error is not merely intellectual but providential.

Why Atheistic Materialism Appears at the End of History

This section sets out the most distinctive Unification contribution—an account not of the logic of materialism but of its appearance—and flags its status as a providential reading rather than an empirical thesis.

Rev. Moon maps the strata of society onto the human body. The head is the era in which an evil principle ruled from the top, the age of empire and aristocracy up to the First World War; the trunk and shoulders are the era of force and military power through the Second World War; the hands and feet are the laboring base, and it is there, at the bottom, that communism gathers its constituency.

As God reclaims each stratum, the adversary is driven downward until he stands on the lowest rung with nowhere further to descend.

The same descent reads as a decline of worldviews, from a God-centered theism (신본주의) through a man-centered humanism (인본주의) to a matter-centered position, and at the last step, the adversary adopts a final expedient: unable to be served, he resolves that God shall not be served, and so denies that God exists at all.

Atheistic materialism, on this reading, is not a confident first principle but a last stratagem, the denial of God erected to bar humanity’s road back to God.

The frame yields a typology of modern war: a first war over things, a second war over people, and a final war over God—a war of ideas fought with truth rather than weapons, over the single question of whether God exists.

This providential anthropology is illuminating from within the tradition, but it is a theological reading of history rather than a testable empirical claim; the figure by which evil is said to advance only so far before falling is a doctrinal image of indemnity, not a measured quantity. It is presented here as the tradition presents it and weighed as such in the synthesis below.

Contradiction Cannot Generate Development

This section establishes the first philosophical objection: opposition produces no binding force and therefore no higher unity.

Unification Thought distinguishes correlatives from opposites. Subject and object — plus and minus, man and woman, mind and body—are correlatives: they share one purpose-sphere, form a common base, and intensify one another through give-and-take. Thesis and antithesis are opposites belonging to different purpose spheres, and two terms with genuinely different purposes can only repel, as like poles repel; they cannot fuse into a synthesis (Lee 2006).

The promised synthesis is, on this analysis, a logical impossibility dressed as a natural law because force requires a common purpose base, and adversaries by definition share none.

Rev. Moon presses the same point with the egg. The dialectician reads the embryo as a thesis oppressed by the shell, which it must destroy to become a chick; both Moon and Lee answer that this misreads the shell’s purpose—while the embryo is weak, the shell is difficult to protect it, and when the chick is ready, the shell thins and opens of itself.

A chick does not war with its shell, and a child need not murder its parents to mature: growth is the unfolding of a purpose inscribed in the seed. Crucially, the objection is not confined to the popular triad.

Lee engages Hegel’s own logic directly, asking why a developing movement should arise at all when a thesis is merely denied by its antithesis and judging it groundless that negation alone should produce advance rather than mere cancellation (Lee 2006).

The Unification claim is that development is the work of dynamic give-and-take centered deliberately, and that negation, left to itself, explains nothing.

Struggle Cannot Be Derived From Matter Alone

This section establishes the internal objection that turns the system against itself.

If matter is genuinely all that exists, there can be no concept of struggle within it, for inert matter does not contend with itself; yet the whole dialectic is built upon struggle.

Pressed on where, if matter is all, the very concept of struggle could have come from—whether matter began to fight itself—the materialist, on Moon’s account, has no answer and must surrender the point.

The objection is a genuine internal tension rather than a theological imposition; it asks the system to ground, from its resources, the one principle on which it most depends.

A theological corollary carries the self-refutation further. Because dialectical materialism is constructed precisely to deny God, it is forced, by the symmetry of its denial, to deny every spiritual being, the satanic included; in striving to prove there is no God, it proves there is no devil, and so removes the very agency that a “satanic” reading of world history would require.

The materialist who abolishes all spirit has sawn off the branch on which his account of conflict would have to sit. This corollary is incorporated here from primary Korean material; its substance is corroborated by the verified 2005 address, but the specific statement awaits a confirmed archive locator and is therefore paraphrased rather than quoted.

The Primacy of Matter Inverts Cause and Effect

This section establishes the metaphysical objection: the system’s founding question is the wrong question, and its idealist parent cannot answer it either.

Diamat’s founding question—what comes first, mind or matter? — is, for Moon, mis-posed. He answers that action precedes both and that action presupposes a subject and an object related by purpose; before energy can exist, there must first be action, and a materialism that denies this breaks down at the fundamental level.

Purpose, moreover, is legible in living organization: the eyebrow exists as if it anticipated the need to keep sweat from the eye, and the answer that such features arose “just naturally” explains nothing.

A science that denies the law of cause and effect is, he insists, no science; communism, lacking directionality, posits only struggle and destruction and is therefore destined to disappear.

The deepest version of the objection is turned against the idealist source.

If, for Hegel, God is pure reason, mind, or Logos—equivalent to “Being” in the triad Being–Nothing–Becoming—then the concept of matter is contained in neither Being nor Essence, and matter, the supposed antithesis, must be an element foreign (Anders) to a purely spiritual God whose source Hegel never locates (Lee 2006).

The materialist heirs inherit the same unsolved problem upside down: having denied mind, they cannot explain the emergence of consciousness, purpose, or value from matter in motion, exactly as the older theism could not explain how matter is made from nothing.

Unification Thought’s counter-account is that matter and reason are co-original attributes of the divine Original Image, relative elements with common features, so that nature arises through give-and-take, the origin-division-union process, and not through negation (Lee 2006).

Knowing Is Give-and-Take, Not Copying

This section establishes that the same flaw recurs in the theory of knowledge.

Marxist epistemology, built on Lenin’s reflection theory, treats cognition as the passive copying of an external material world, with the inner principle named the unity of struggle and opposition (Lenin 1909).

Unification Thought answers with an epistemology of give-and-take: the object exists independently, but it is the human subject who takes the initiative in cognition, and knowledge develops as a latent inner prototype is matched against the outer world through reciprocal exchange, not through a struggle that works upon and changes the object (Lee 2006).

The materialist who declares that social being determines consciousness has, on this reading, quietly denied the active subject whom revolutionary practice everywhere presupposes—the cadre who is supposed to change the world is, by the theory, only a product of it.

History Advances by Central Persons, Not Class War

This section establishes the application to history, and the practical fruit the tradition reads from the system.

Applied to history, diamat makes the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production, expressed as class struggle, the sole motor of development, reducing the individual to a representative of class forces.

The Unification theory of history replaces this inner dynamic of material struggle with give-and-take centered on God, in which providential central people, set up by the law of the dominion of the center, are the subject and the public the object; history advances by harmonization and the raising up of leaders, not by the war of classes.

The conflict-paradigm is traced back past Hegel to a Greek instinct that made the strong the measure—survival of the fittest, the strong devouring the weak — and forward into Darwinism; Moon inverts the predatory image, holding that the weak take refuge in the strong and the small is gathered to protect the great, so that the movement of the cosmos is shelter and harmonization, not destruction.

At the root, the tradition holds that the dialectic was constructed to deny God, and that calling it scientific lent respectability to an atheism whose specific target is religion, through which God reclaims humanity.

The practical fruit, in Moon’s reading, falls on the family: communism treats the family as the seat of contradiction and the starting point of exploitation and, at its extreme, has demanded that kin denounce kin; yet the liberal West’s free-sex decadence and disposable marriage are the individualist twin of the same denial that man and woman, mind and body, are correlatives meant to unite. The signature of the two systems is finally their opposite modes of advance.

Communists develop through demonstration; we develop through assembly

— Sun Myung Moon (“통일사상과 승공이론을 알라” / Tongilsasang-gwa Seunggong-iron-eul Alla, 09/28/2001; vol. 354, sermon 8) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Translation from the Korean original (vol. 354, sermon 8, delivered September 28, 2001).

A philosophy of struggle, the argument runs, can never reach the harmony it claims as its goal, because nothing built by demonstration can settle: even a victorious communism would have to keep demonstrating against itself.

Matter Is Not the Enemy—Materialism (유물론) Versus Matter-ism (물본주의)

This section establishes a point easily missed: the mature critique does not condemn the valuing of matter.

In a 2005 address, Rev. Moon introduces a deliberate terminological reform, distinguishing yumullon (유물론), materialism, the doctrine that only matter exists, from his coinage mulbonjuui (물본주의), matter-ism, the God-centered affirmation that the material world is good and essential.

I do not say materialism; I say matter-ism

— Sun Myung Moon (“하나님 중심의 절대 신본주의·절대 인본주의·절대 물본주의·절대 성원주의” / God-Centered Absolute Theism, Humanism, Matter-ism, and Seongwon-ism, 02/04/2005; vol. 486, sermon 3) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Translation from the Korean original (vol. 486, sermon 3, delivered February 4, 2005).

The distinction reframes the whole critique. Communism’s error is not that it esteems matter but that it absolutizes matter alone and denies God and mind—it is “matter only,” a counterfeit that strips away the inner, spiritual dimension.

The restored order is a threefold affirmation held together by love: an absolute theism (절대 신본주의), an absolute humanism (절대 인본주의), and an absolute matter-ism (절대 물본주의), all centered on God and united not by force but by the love that lives for the sake of the other.

The quarrel with dialectical materialism is therefore not a quarrel between spirit and matter, as if the tradition simply took the idealist side of the old debate; it is a quarrel about whether matter, mind, and God form one purpose-centered order, or whether matter is made the lonely absolute with God and mind denied. This guards the critique against any charge of being anti-material, anti-body, or anti-science.

The History of the Term

This section establishes, from a title-level scan of the indexed sermon corpus, when the doctrine and its Unification reframing actually enter the record.

The scan is itself diagnostic. Across 6,118 indexed sermons, the words 유물론 (materialism) and 변증법 (dialectic) appear in no sermon title at all: they are body-level analytical concepts that Rev. Moon expounds at length but never foregrounds as a topic.

The institutional anti-communist vocabulary surfaces instead under 승공 (victory over communism), which appears in sermon titles from 1981 to 2001, and under 통일사상 (Unification Thought), present once in 1971 and then in a cluster across the 2000s.

The distinctively Unification reframing of the doctrine is, by contrast, a precise and datable late coinage. The contrast between the two logics is named side by side in a single title — “정분합과 정반합,” origin-division-union and thesis-antithesis-synthesis—delivered on August 4, 2001 (vol. 350, sermon 3).

The rehabilitation of matter follows in one further title, the fourfold “하나님 중심의 절대 신본주의·절대 인본주의·절대 물본주의·절대 성원주의,” delivered on February 4, 2005 (vol. 486, sermon 3), which introduces 물본주의 (matter-ism) as a title term exactly once in the entire corpus.

The mature form of the doctrine—the renaming of the quarrel as 정반합 against 정분합 and the rehabilitation of matter as 물본주의—therefore dates to the 2001–2005 founding period of Cheon Il Guk, even though the underlying critique of communism is decades older. Because each reframing term occurs in only one title, the counts fall far below the threshold at which a frequency chart communicates anything a sentence cannot; the finding is reported here in prose by design.

The Counterproposal—Godism and Head-Wing Thought

This section establishes that the tradition does not stop at refutation but offers a replacement.

Rev. Moon reads communism and liberal democracy as twin errors arising from one root ignorance—that mind and body are a subject-object partnership rather than a contradiction.

From “matter first” arose communism; from “mind first” arose democracy; both began with people who did not know that mind and body are correlatives meant to unite. His proposal, Godism and Head-Wing Thought, claims to resolve the left-right antagonism not by the victory of one wing but by a head that unites them, modeled on the body in which the eyes, hands, and senses cooperate around a single purpose rather than struggling for mastery (Moon, vol. 168, September 27, 1987).

In its mature form, the proposal is a movement of return: brotherism, the rule of contending siblings, must return to parentism, and parentism to God-centeredness.

The Korean shorthand for the entire disagreement is the pair jeong-ban-hap (正反合), the dialectical triad of struggle, against jeong-bun-hap (正分合), origin-division-union through love—the satanic inversion set against the original grammar of being. The fuller development belongs to the companion entries Godism and Headwing Philosophy.

Analytical Synthesis

The thesis of this study is that dialectical materialism mistakes a fallen condition for the law of being and fails on that account at the levels of logic, metaphysics, and providence.

The strongest objection to the thesis is not Marxist but methodological: that conflict genuinely is a law of nature—visible in predation, scarcity, competition, and entropy—so that the system describes the world accurately, and the appeal to the Fall is an unfalsifiable device that offloads all observed antagonism onto a single theological hinge.

On this reading, the critique purchases its coherence at too high a price, explaining every conflict by one event that cannot be examined.

The cited evidence does real work against the objection, though not all of it is equally decisive. Three of the Unification objections are serious philosophy in any company and stand independently of the Fall.

The self-refutation point—that struggle cannot arise from inert matter, so pure materialism cannot ground the very dialectic it asserts—is a genuine internal tension for the system.

The teleological objection, that purpose is legible in living organization and that “it just came to be naturally,” explains nothing, and the demand that materialism account for the emergence of consciousness and value remains a live difficulty. And the charge that Hegel cannot locate the origin of matter within a purely spiritual Absolute is a real tension in the idealist source, which Unification Thought presses against Hegel’s own logic and not merely against the popular triad (Lee 2006).

The terminological reform strengthens the position further by detaching the critique from any anti-material animus: the quarrel is with matter made an absolute, not with matter as such (Moon, February 4, 2005).

The burden must also be marked honestly. The triad that Moon and Lee chiefly attack is the post-Hegelian schematization of Chalybäus rather than Hegel’s own determinate negation, and against Hegel’s subtler logic, the contrast must be argued rather than asserted, even though Unification Thought does engage that logic.

The providential anthropology of the adversary’s descent and the typology of the three wars is a theological reading illuminating from within the tradition but not an empirical thesis, and the master move of assigning all genuine conflict to the post-lapsarian register is internally coherent yet explanatorily expensive, carrying the whole weight of observed antagonism on the single hinge of the Fall.

Refuting the metaphysics, finally, does not by itself overturn every observation of historical materialism as social analysis; the Unification claim is the deeper one, that without the right ontology of purpose, such analysis mistakes the wound for the law. Within the frame, however, the verdict follows from one premise: a cosmos held together by give-and-take centered deliberately cannot be the cosmos of permanent struggle that dialectical materialism describes.

Key Takeaway

• The Unification critique turns on one diagnosis: dialectical materialism mistakes conflict, a fallen condition, for the law of being itself.
• Stated on its terms, the system rests on three pillars—the primacy of matter, development through struggle, and the denial of God, purpose, and fixed human nature.
• A single counter-premise reverses all three: the cosmos develops through give-and-take action centered deliberately, within origin-division-union, not through contradiction.
• The system is internally unstable: struggle cannot be derived from inert matter alone, so pure materialism cannot ground the dialectic it asserts.
• It inverts cause and effect, and its idealist parent cannot say where matter comes from, since matter is foreign to a purely spiritual Absolute.
• Rev. Moon’s mature reform distinguishes materialism (유물론), matter made the lonely absolute, from matter-ism (물본주의), the God-centered affirmation of matter as good.
• A title-level corpus scan dates the reframed doctrine precisely: 정분합 against 정반합 in 2001 and 물본주의 in 2005, while 유물론 and 변증법 never appear in a sermon title.
• The counterproposal is Godism and Head-Wing Thought: a uniting head rather than a victorious wing, and the return of brotherism to parentism to God-centeredness.

References

Chalybäus, Heinrich Moritz. 1837. Historische Entwicklung der spekulativen Philosophie von Kant bis Hegel. Dresden.

Cheon Seong Gyeong: Selections from the Speeches of Sun Myung Moon. 2003. 2nd ed.

Engels, Friedrich. 1878. Anti-Dühring.

Exposition of the Divine Principle. 1996.Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1841. Das Wesen des Christentums [The Essence of Christianity].

Hegel, G. W. F. 1816. Wissenschaft der Logik [Science of Logic].

Lee, Sang Hun. 1973. Communism: A Critique and Counterproposal.

Lee, Sang Hun. 2006. New Essentials of Unification Thought: Head-Wing Thought. Tokyo: Unification Thought Institute. Theory of the Original Image and Critique of Major Traditional Viewpoints of Substance

Lenin, V. I. 1909. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

Marx, Karl. 1859. Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie [A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy], Preface; and 1867, Das Kapital, vol. 1.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1987. “우리는 통일주의자다 [Urineun tongiljuuija da / We Are Unificationists].” Sermon, September 27, 1987, vol. 168, sermon 6.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2001a. “정분합과 정반합 [Jeongbunhap-gwa jeongbanhap].” Sermon, August 4, 2001, vol. 350, sermon 3.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2001b. “통일사상과 승공이론을 알라 [Tongilsasang-gwa seunggong-iron-eul alla].” Sermon, September 28, 2001, vol. 354, sermon 8.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2005. “하나님 중심의 절대 신본주의·절대 인본주의·절대 물본주의·절대 성원주의 [God-centered absolute theism, humanism, matter-ism, and Seongwon-ism].” Sermon, February 4, 2005 vol. 486, sermon 3.