Unification Thought

Unification Thought (통일사상 / Tongil Sasang): The Original Image Extended into Every Field in Unification Doctrine

통일사상 · 統一思想 · Tongil Sasang, Unification Philosophy

What Is Unification Thought?

Unification Thought is the systematic philosophy of the Unification Movement, which takes the Divine Principle’s account of the inner structure of God and works it out across eleven fields of inquiry: ontology, the original nature of the human being, the theory of value, education, ethics, art, history, epistemology, logic, and methodology, all derived from a first division called the theory of the Original Image. Its standard exposition is the work of Dr. Sang Hun Lee, and Rev. Sun Myung Moon described it as the thought God had long held to make the relation of God, humanity, and the cosmos known to human beings.

It is not a summary of the Divine Principle and not a defense of it. The Divine Principle sets out creation, the Fall, and restoration; Unification Thought asks what follows for beauty, for knowledge, for schooling, for the writing of history and answers each question from the same source.

This entry argues that the unity of Unification Thought is generative rather than systematic. Its eleven divisions are not eleven subjects arranged in a philosophy but eleven consequences of one structure, which is why Rev. Sun Myung Moon could say that the whole becomes visible once the theory of the Original Image is understood, and why the corpus preaches the applied outcomes far more often than the term itself. The distinction matters because it determines what the philosophy is answerable to. A system is judged by internal consistency; a derivation is judged by whether it really follows from its root.

What are the fundamentals of the universe?

— Sun Myung Moon (01/25/1990) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Moon presents this as the question he pondered more than anyone, and says that solving it is what allowed him to come forward with the name Unification Church. The order is worth noting. The philosophy is not offered as the elaboration of a religion already in place; the religion is presented as issuing from an answer to a question about the structure of everything. That claim is what Unification Thought then attempts to make good on in detail.

Methodology Note

This entry reads the official English Cheon Seong Gyeong compilation, the eleven-chapter exposition of Unification Thought published at uthought.org and cited here as Lee 2006; the Exposition of the Divine Principle; and the title-level index of the Korean speech archive of Rev. Sun Myung Moon covering 6,118 addresses from 1956 to 2010. The canonical texts are read as authoritative within the tradition, attending to their historical and rhetorical setting; the aim is doctrinal clarification, not external evaluation. The entry does not attempt an exposition of any single division of Unification Thought, an account of its publication history or editions, or a treatment of Godism, head-wing thought, Communism, or the Exposition of the Divine Principle, all of which have their entries. Inter-religious comparison is omitted at the editor’s direction and because the term is a philosophical rather than a devotional one. All blockquotes come from the official English Cheon Seong Gyeong and are cited by the date of the underlying address.

The whole becomes visible once the theory of the Original Image is understood

The archive contains one title that functions as an instruction for how to read the entire system, and it deserves to be taken at face value.

On December 19, 2001, Rev. Sun Myung Moon delivered an address titled to the effect that Unification Thought becomes visible once one knows the theory of the Original Image (Moon 2001b, vol. 363).

The theory of the Original Image, 원상론, is the first chapter of the exposition, and it is not a chapter about method or about history. It is an account of what God is internally: the relation between sungsang and hyungsang, the give and receive action between them, the four-position foundation formed by that action, and the ideal of creation that issues from it (Lee 2006).

The claim in the title is therefore structural rather than pedagogical. It does not say that the Original Image is the easiest place to begin. It says that from there the rest becomes visible, which is what one says about a root and not about an introduction.

The exposition is built accordingly. Every subsequent division opens by naming its foundation in the Principle before it says anything about its subject. The theory of education begins with the divine image and the Three Blessings; the theory of art begins with the Unification Principle as its basis; the theory of ethics does the same (Lee 2006). This is not a stylistic tic. It is the structure of a derivation being displayed at each step.

there was motivation and purpose behind our creation

— Sun Myung Moon (11/27/1980) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The passage continues by drawing the methodological conclusion the whole philosophy runs on: to reveal that motivation and purpose, a correct view of God must first be developed, and only then can the reason for practicing love for the sake of peace be clarified. First the doctrine of God, then everything else. Reverse the order, and one is left with values that rest on preference.

there could not be a standard of absolute values in this world

— Sun Myung Moon (03/29/1994) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The conditional in the address is the non-existence of God, and the consequence drawn is not moral chaos but the collapse of the ground on which ethics could be staked at all. A society without ethics, Rev. Moon adds, has no philosophical basis for treating human beings as the lords of creation. This is the axiological division of Unification Thought, stated in a sentence, and it shows the derivation running from the existence of God to the possibility of value and only then to particular values.

Eleven divisions, one derivation

The architecture of the exposition is the clearest evidence for the entry’s reading, because a system assembled from separate philosophical concerns would not have this shape.

Read the sequence, and the logic is visible. The first division states what God is. The second asks what it is for anything to exist, given that. The third asks what a human being is, given that. From the third, follow the divisions that concern human activity: what is valuable, how a person is formed, how a person should act, what beauty is. Then the divisions that concern human knowing: how history moves, how knowledge is possible, how thinking is structured, and by what method one proceeds.

Two features of this arrangement carry argument.

The first is that the theory of value comes before ethics, education, and art rather than after them. In most philosophical systems axiology is a specialized late topic. Here it is early, because on this account value is not a human posit but a property that a thing has in relation to God’s purpose, and nothing can be said about education or art until that is settled.

The second is that logic and methodology come last rather than first. A philosophy that took its method as its foundation would open with them. This one closes with them, because in a derivation the method is itself derived: the Unification method is a give-and-receive action, which is the very relation set out in the first chapter (Lee 2006). The last division turns out to be the first division applied to thinking.

We need to search for a new set of values

— Sun Myung Moon (05/23/1971) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The address specifies four domains for the search, naming the world, humankind, ideology, and love, and adds that a set of values taking shape in accordance with God’s will would have a matrix entirely different from one established by human will. “Matrix” is the right word for what this entry has been calling a “root.” The claim is not that different conclusions will be reached but that they will be reached from a different place.

Unification Thought, Godism, and head-wing thought are not three names for one thing

The corpus uses three terms in this area and treats them as distinct, and Rev. Sun Myung Moon set out the distinction with unusual precision in his Korean preaching.

Head-wing thought, 두익사상, is addressed to the political and philosophical division of left and right. Moon called it a “thought of the body,” meaning the element required for life in this world, and said it is the term that works with materialists and humanists because it meets them on ground they accept.

Godism, 하나님주의, is addressed to religious people, and Rev. Moon called it a thought of the spirit. He also gave the Korean word for ideology, 주의, a definition that is easy to pass over: it means a way of living, and he enumerated the levels at which such a way of living operates, from the individual through family, society, nation, and world to the cosmos. Godism is therefore not a doctrine about God but a manner of life centered on God.

Unification Thought, in this scheme, is what results when the two are made one, and Moon said so directly, describing 통일주의 as the two joined to constitute a complete person. Head-wing is the outward form addressed to the world’s division; Godism is the inward principle addressed to the believer; Unification Thought is the philosophy in which both are stated together.

Head-wing thought exists to resolve the right- and left-wing ideologies.

— Sun Myung Moon (10/31/1987) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The verb is “resolve” rather than “defeat,” and the same address holds that the two wings can be joined by neither knowledge nor money nor power but only by love. This is the point at which the political vocabulary hands back to the philosophical one, since love as a principle of union is a claim about the structure of being and belongs to the first division of the system rather than to the last.

The distinction also explains a fact about the archive that would otherwise look like inconsistency. Titles containing 하나님주의 and 두익 cluster tightly in the years 1985 to 1994, seven of each, five of them naming both terms together. Titles containing 통일사상 do not cluster there at all. They appear once in 1971 and then not again until 2001, after which six fall between 2001 and 2005. The two vocabularies belong to different decades because they do different work: one was the form the argument took while the world was divided into two wings; the other is the philosophy that outlasted the division.

The corpus preaches the applications far more than the term

The title-level record makes the same point quantitatively, and the disproportion is large.

Across 6,118 indexed sermons, eight titles contain 통일사상. Against this, forty-eight titles contain 절대가치, absolute value, which is the name of the philosophy’s fourth division as it appears in public. Seven contain 하나님주의 and seven 두익, with five of these overlapping. Two contain 본체론, the theory of ultimate reality, both of them late, in 2008 and 2009.

The absolute-value titles are not evenly spread, and their distribution is itself informative. Eight fall in a series of November addresses running from 1974 to 1987, almost one every year, which is the pattern of an annual conference rather than of ordinary preaching; the 1982 address in that series is titled simply for the absolute view of value (Moon 1982, vol. 122). Then, after a long interval, twenty-five fell in the single year 2004, joined repeatedly to true love, to the true family, and to the owner of love.

The shape suggests two distinct careers for the same doctrine. In the first, “absolute value” is the term in which the philosophy is presented to scholars at an annual gathering. In the second, it has migrated into ordinary preaching and been fused with the movement’s central family vocabulary. What is constant across both is that the term “preached” is the application rather than the system itself.

This is what the entry’s reading predicts. A generative philosophy is not preached as a philosophy, because its whole point is that it issues in claims about particular things. One preaches the value, the education, the art. The system is what one studies, and the corpus says so at the end: the September 2001 address instructs the hearer to know Unification Thought together with the theory of victory over communism, placing both in the category of things to be learned (Moon 2001a, vol. 354).

The absolute being is only one; there cannot be two or three absolute beings.

— Sun Myung Moon (11/25/1982) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Delivered in the November conference series, and the surrounding argument is the philosophy at work. Rev. Moon holds that religious conflict has its root in the vagueness of doctrines of ultimate reality; that each tradition names an absolute being and denies the others, which reduces all of them to relative gods; and that, in consequence, no religion has yet established an absolute system of value.

The remedy proposed is not a new religion displacing the others but a corrected doctrine of ultimate reality under which each tradition can keep its sign and still cooperate. That is the first division of Unification Thought doing public work.

Analytical Synthesis

The thesis was that the unity of Unification Thought is generative rather than systematic, so that its eleven divisions are consequences of one structure rather than parts of an arrangement. Four lines of evidence converge. The corpus contains an explicit instruction that the whole becomes visible once the theory of the Original Image is known. The exposition opens every division by naming its foundation in the Principle before treating its subject. The order of divisions places value early and method last, which is the order of a derivation and not of a system. And the title-level record shows the applications reached far more than the term, which is the profile of a philosophy that issues in particulars.

The strongest objection reads the philosophy the other way: as the movement’s apologetic, developed to give the Principle academic standing and to supply a counterproposal to dialectical materialism. On this account, the derivation from the Original Image is the form the argument takes rather than its origin, and the real organizing principle is the opponent. The objection has substantial support.

Every division of the exposition closes with a critique of rival systems, and the rivals named are specific: Kant and Marx in epistemology, Hegel and Marx in logic, socialist realism in art, and the communist and democratic views in education (Lee 2006). The September 2001 address pairs Unification Thought with the theory of victory over communism as a single body of knowledge. And the vocabulary of Godism and head-wing thought belongs almost entirely to the last decade of the Cold War.

The objection is serious, and it preserves something this reading must not lose. The philosophy was elaborated in a polemical setting and bears its marks throughout.

But two features of the evidence favor the generative reading where the two diverge.

The first is the 1971 title. An address on the practitioner of Unification Thought is dated November 6, 1971 (Moon 1971, vol. 50), more than a decade before the ideological campaign in which the philosophy is supposed to have been forged, and its subject is a person who lives by the thought rather than an argument to be deployed. The addresses of the same period on new values are framed in the same way, asking what a person should build a life on. A philosophy invented as a counterproposal does not begin with a title about practice.

The second is the position of the Original Image.

If the organising principle were the opponent, the first division would be whatever is most directly opposed to materialism, which would be ontology or methodology. Instead, the first division is an account of God’s own inner constitution, a doctrine with no polemical purchase whatever, from which the contested divisions are then derived. The instruction that the whole becomes visible from there is difficult to read as an apologetic strategy, since one does not tell an opponent to begin with the premise he denies.

What the argument does not entail should be stated plainly. It does not entail that the critiques of rival philosophies are secondary decoration, since they occupy a large part of the exposition and are clearly meant seriously. It does not entail that Unification Thought is independent of the Divine Principle, since the whole claim is that it is derived from it. It does not entail that the philosophy is complete or closed, since the corpus itself returns to the theory of ultimate reality in 2008 and 2009 with the remark that such a theory must come forth (Moon 2008, vol. 596). And it does not entail that a reader must accept the derivation, only that the derivation is what is being offered.

What it does entail is a rule for reading the term. Any claim in Unification Thought, in any of its eleven divisions, should be traceable back to the account of God’s inner structure in the first, and where a claim cannot be traced back, it has not yet been shown to belong to the system at all.

Key Takeaway

• Unification Thought is the systematic philosophy of the Unification Movement, working the Divine Principle’s account of God’s inner structure out across eleven fields of inquiry.
• Its standard exposition is the work of Dr. Sang Hun Lee and comprises the theory of the Original Image, ontology, original human nature, axiology, education, ethics, art, history, epistemology, logic, and methodology.
• The unity of the system is generative rather than systematic, since each division is derived from the first rather than added alongside it.
• Rev. Sun Myung Moon stated in December 2001 that Unification Thought becomes visible once one knows the theory of the Original Image.
• The theory of value comes early, and method comes last, which is the order of a derivation rather than of a philosophical system.
• Head-wing thought addresses the division of left and right; Godism addresses religious life, and Unification Thought is the philosophy in which both are stated together.
• The Korean word for ideology, 주의, was defined by Rev. Sun Myung Moon as a way of living, operating from the individual level up to the cosmic.
• Across the 6,118-sermon Korean archive, eight titles contain 통일사상 while forty-eight contain 절대가치, so the applications are preached far more than the system.
• Eight of the absolute-value titles form an annual November series from 1974 to 1987, while twenty-five fall in the single year 2004.

References

Cheon Seong Gyeong: Selections from the Speeches of Sun Myung Moon. 2003. 2nd ed. Seoul: Family Federation for World Peace and Unification.

Exposition of the Divine Principle. 1996. New York: Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity.

Lee, Sang Hun. 2006. New Essentials of Unification Thought: Head-Wing Thought. Tokyo: Unification Thought Institute. Chapters cited from the exposition published at https://uthought.org.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1971. “통일사상의 실천자.” Sermon, November 6, 1971. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 50, sermon 5.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1982. “절대적 가치관.” Sermon, November 25, 1982. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 122, sermon 10.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1987. “두익(頭翼)사상.” Sermon, March 30, 1987. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 162, sermon 5.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1990. “두익사상과 하나님주의.” Sermon, December 28, 1990. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 211, sermon 1.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1994. “이제 하나님주의를 주창할 때가 왔습니다.” Sermon, July 26, 1994. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 262, sermon 3.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2001a. “통일사상과 승공이론을 알라.” Sermon, September 28, 2001. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 354, sermon 8.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2001b. “통일사상은 원상론을 알면 보인다.” Sermon, December 19, 2001. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 363, sermon 6.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2004a. “통일사상의 근본.” Sermon, February 3, 2004. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 435, sermon 5.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2004b. “참부모와 통일사상.” Sermon, June 14, 2004. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 453, sermon 6.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2004c. “통일사상의 위대함.” Sermon, October 15, 2004. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 473, sermon 5.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2008. “본체론이 나와야 된다.” Sermon, August 31, 2008. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 596, sermon 13.