Unification Thought
I am still working on this article.—Keisuke Noda 02:15, 21 Sep 2005 (CDT)
What is Unification Thought?
Unification Thought is the philosophy of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. The late Dr. Sang Hun Lee, a disciple of Reverend Moon, articulated his understanding of Rev. Moon's thought, according to standard philosophical areas, in close consultation with Reverend Moon. Dr. Lee first published his work under the title Unification Thought. Although Unification Thought is Reverend Moon's thought, the term alternatively designates, for some unification scholars, Dr. Lee's philosophical development of Reverend Moon's thought. Dr. Lee's works do not exhaust Reverend Moon's thought, which continues to develop, yet they provide a basic philosphical outline.
Unification Thought is the philosophical basis for social, political, economic, religious, and other activities in the Unification Movement.
Characteristics
The term unification in Unification Thought has two senses.
First, it expresses the zeal, ideals for unity. Since the beginning of human history, the world, from personal life to global affairs, has been chaotically divided. Conflicts and struggles on all levels become a stumbling block to achieve peace, harmony, and happiness, which humanity has been longing for. Unification Thought has zeal and ideals for bringing the world from destructive conflicts and struggles to re-conciliation, peace, and harmony. Unification Thought has a Messianic zeal and ideals in saving humanity by achieving harmonic unity on all levels of personal and social lives.
Second, the term unification describes the fundamental characteristics of this thought. Unification Thought has an internal integral unity among various treatises. It encompasses theories on God, human nature, nature, ethics, art, education, knowledge, logic, method, and history. These branches of thought are uniformly integrated by a consistent application of a number of key insights.
While Hegel and Marx developed a philosophy as a system which includes a theory history, Western philosophies in the 20th century rejected the notion of philosophy as a systematic thought. Both analytic philosophy and phenomenology defined philosophy as a methodology and did not include a theory of history as its component. A lack of historical perspective limited their social impacts. Western philosophy became highly methodological and this tendency still continues today.
Marxism, on the other hand, which gave the strongest social impacts in the 20th century, appeared as a system of though with Messianic idealism and promised to liberate humans from oppression and suffering. Due to its wrong assumptions, Marxism failed. Unification Thought is a systematic thought built upon theistic assumptions with Messianic passion and idealism.
Presuppositions
Unification Thought is built upon two assumptions: God's existence and the existence of thespirit world or a life after death. Unlike other theistic thinkers as Anselms, Kant, Kierkegaard, Unification Thought does not explore the paths for the existence of God and afterlife. These existential positions are presupposed. Questions concerning the existence of God are partially answered, yet a systematic attempt to answer this question has not been given. It remains as a task to be explored.
Framework
Four major concepts that constitute Unification Thought are: God, Purpose of Creation, Interdependency of beings, and Give-and-receive action.
God
God as the Creator is the central axis of Unification Thought. At the age of sixteen, Reverend Moon made a dramatic encounter with God and Jesus. In the revelation, God disclosed his heart of suffering to him, which was caused by the sufferings of mankind. It is the heart of God that moved Reverent Moon to take a Messianic role to save mankind, and led him to the lifelong journey of restoring the world back to the original world of Creation. At the core of Reverend Moon's discourses, lies his understanding of God's love, passion, and heart for humanity.
From the perspective of Unification Thought, harmony, peace, reconciliation, happiness, and unity are achieved only when God's heart and love are embodied by humans and the principles of true love are practiced and applied. Unificationist culture built upon God's heart is called a culture of heart.
The Purpose of Creation
God created human beings as His eternal partner of love, who can embody, substantialize, and share His love. Within God’s realm of heart, God and human beings co-create, human beings responsibly care and manage natural environments and establish a civilization of spring. Creation of the world of eternal joy and happiness, this is God's purpose of creation of the world. Accordingly, this purpose of creation precedes existence of all beings and all human activities such as thinking, knowing, doing, acting, creating, and universally underlies all phenomena in the world.
The purpose of creation for human beings is further articulated into three goals of life called Three Great Blessings. The tripartite components are the perfection of the individual, multiplication of children, and dominion over the creation.
The first goal for individual is to perfect one's character by inheriting God's true love and becoming the embodiment of truth.
The second goal is to form an ideal family and to co-create the Four Realm of Heart with God. While the formation of one's family is the basis, the concept of family in Unification Thought is extended to national, global, and cosmic level. God's love manifested in the family is applied to global and cosmic realm. Unification Thought conceives the world as a global family.
The third goal is to develop and exercise creativity and properly manage all creations. Care of nature and thoughtful development of culture, societies, and environments are the third goal.
Interdependency of Reciprocal Beings
Love can exist in the relationships. While God is self-existent and transcendent, He created human beings as His eternal partner of love. God and human beings are, therefore, mutually interdependent. The interdependency of God and human beings has decisive effects in the heartistic relationship between them. No matter how much love God has or even if God exists as love, if human beings are sorrowful and suffer, God are equally or more sorrowful and suffer as their eternal parents. God in Unification Thought is, therefore, absolute and relative, transcendent and historical. While God's love is in itself absolute ad self-subsistent and is not affected by anything else, His heart is affected by the heart of human beings. In other words, God can be joyful or sorrowful because He is love and loves human beings. If God is indifferent to human beings, God neither suffers nor be joyful. It is the revealed insight of Reverend Moon, that God has been sorrowful and suffering throughout the process of human history because of the suffering lives of human beings.
God and human beings are interdependent in another sense. God's love remains as hidden from the world until it is manifested through human beings. Family is the basic unit where His love is manifested. God's love is substantialized through parental love to children, conjugal love between husband and wife, children's love to parents, and love among siblings. The three objective love displays a basic pattern how God's love is realized in the world. Family, in Unification Thought, is the basic unit of society, because individuals can cultivate heart and embody God's love in interactive exchange of love among members of family. God's love one embodied in one's family is extended to social relationship, leading to the creation of the culture of heart.
The principle of interdependency of reciprocal beings pervades all beings in the world. Internal character and external form in individual being, masculinity and femininity, human beings and nature, beings in the nature and the universe, all exists under this principle. This principle manifests itself in social, political, and economical realm as the Ideals of Interdependence, Mutual Prosperity, and Universally Shared Values. These ideals are manifested as various visions in Unification Movements to build the world for the coming centuries.
Give-and-receive Action
God gave existence to human beings and other beings in the universe out of His love. Human beings and other things received their being as the gift. At the very origin of the world, the fact of giving and receiving lies. Likewise in human life, parents participate in the process of giving a being or a life to a new individual. Each individual receives his or her being.
The principle of give-and -receive, thus, characterizes the origin of existence, and this is the archetype of the notion of give-and-receive. This archetype is modified in a variety of modes and manners. From physico-chemical interactions among physical entities to human and social interactions among human beings and social entities, both active and passive interactions are conceived as the give-and-take actions. Unification methodology universally applies these concepts to all interactive relationships.
This notion of give-and-receive is similar to that of give-and-take. But, there is a slight yet an important difference. While give-and-take implies mutuality of exchange, give-and-receive implies the spirit of giving and receiving or loving and appreciating. The notion of give-and-receive has an emotional tone of loving, and it is manifested in many interactive human relationships.
Precedence of giving over receiving in the give-and-receive action implies the spirit of serving others. Unification Thought expresses its essence in the motto, "living for the sake of others." Altruistic servicing spirit of Unification Thought is embodied in the concept of give-and-receive, and this concept underlies all service activities and peace movements in Unificationism.
Philosophic Characteristics of the Principles
The Principles discussed in Unification Thought are transcendent in the sense that they pre-determine how beings can exist, prior to our experience and discovery of them. We can find empirical manifestations of these principles in the world, but these principles are not rules generalized based upon experiences. Human experiences are possible within the matrix of these pre-determined ontological principles.
God, Human Beings, and Nature
Unification Thought conceives the world as a being that manifests God's nature. Beings in the world resemble God's nature in varying degrees. Since human beings are objective partner of God, they manifest God's nature in the highest degree and the fullest extent. Human beings are God's substantial object in image and other natural beings are substantial objects in symbol.
Since God's essential nature is love, human beings embody and manifest His love. Natural beings manifest God's love only in a symbolic pattern, which should not be called love in the strict sense. The degree of manifestation of God's love determines the hierarchical distinction between human beings and natural beings. Human beings are entitled to manage and administer natural world under the condition that they embody God's love and manage the nature with care and love. Absence or distorted state of love in human beings is destroying both human society and natural environments.
Key Ontological Principles
From Plato and Aristotle onward, the dipolar concept of form and matter served in various forms as one of key concepts in Western philosophy. In the tradition of Far Eastern thought, dipolar concept of yin and yang served as one of central concept since antiquity. In Unification Thought, these two key concepts from traditions of East and West are integrated within theistic framework. Unification Thought conceives these two types of dual characteristics as the architecture through which God's love is manifested and substantialized. Human beings consisting of man and woman are understood as the substantial embodiment of these polar principles and the archetypal model of all beings in the world.
Dual Characteristics of Internal Character and External Form
A being is understood as the integral unity of dual characteristics of internal character (Sungsang in Korean language) and external form (Hyungsang in Korean language). An individual human being is understood as the unity of mind and body or spirituality and physicality or soul and flesh. In other words, each individual exits as spiritual-physical unity. Human experiences are, therefore, both spiritual and physical at the same time. When one sees a flower for example, one experiences all the meanings and values together with the sense perception. Visual image stimulates human body and physiological changes occur in human body. Together with the physical phenomena, mental or spiritual aspects of the experience such as emotional feelings, memories, values, meanings, and all other associated interpretive factors constitute one's experience. Each particular experience is the psycho-somatic unity. Language is seen as the unity of sense and sounds or written expression. Likewise, the principle of the dual characteristics of internal character and external form applies to all beings in the world.
The dual characteristics of internal character and external form are manifested as the duality of the spirituality and economy, the religion or values and science, and the spirit world and earthly world. This principle gives us a perspective to see phenomena from this polar point of view from matters of personal life to global affairs. Just like human being is the interactive unity of the spirit and body, phenomena have both spiritual/mental/value aspects and physical/bodily aspects. Unification Thought also conceives this duality as internal and external, invisible and visible.
In human life, however, there is a serious conflict between the spiritual and the physical or the domination of the spiritual desire for values by the physical desires or lust. Physical desires or lust often dominates individual, and economic perspective dominates society. The power of the physical or the economy surpasses that of the spiritual. In order to restore the original order between the spiritual and the physical or the mind and body, individual has to be empowered through the embodiment of true love, and the society has to be empowered by the development of the culture of heart. Unification Thought sees the restoration of true love as the key for restoring the original unity of the spiritual and the physical or the mind and body both in individual and society.
Dual Characteristics of Yin and Yang
A being comes to exist and phenomena take place with another principle of duality. It is the principle of the dual characteristics of yin and yang. Human beings exist as a pair of man and woman. The interdependent duality or polarity of man and woman are the archetype of yin and yang. As described before, human beings are the fullest manifestation of God's nature. The harmonious love between man and woman is the essence of this principle. When a man and a woman become fully matured by embodying God's love, conjugal love between man and woman manifest God's love in the next stage. Conjugal love becomes the source of a new life. Sexuality of human beings is originally the channel through which God's love becomes a power to produce a new being. Sexual activities are in this sense highly spiritual activities.
Just like man and woman, the principle of yin and yang determines how beings in natural world come to exist. Duality of male and female, positive electric charge and negative electric charge are the manifestation of this principle in nature.
Like Far Eastern yin-yang philosophy, Unification Thought conceives polar articulation of being such as high and low, up and down, convex and concave, light and shadow, movement and tranquility, dynamic and static as a manifestation of yin-yang principle. In Unification Thought, duality of man and woman is the archetype of the substantial realization of this principle in the world. This principle is primarily meant to realize God's love. Although all yin and yang relationships in the world do not necessarily manifest love in an explicit form, they display harmony which is one of the essential characteristics of love. The principle of yin and yang is the principle of harmony.
Architecture of Unification Thought
Unification Thought is constituted of particular theories divided into basic philosophical areas. These theories are integrally unified as an organic whole, thereby present a holistic perspective. Analyses, developments, studies and applications of ideas of Unification Thought are still underway. What is available in Unification literature today is a basic summary of Reverent Moon’s thought. There are numerous themes and topics that are not adequately explored.
Since philosophy has been developed and shaped in particular forms by the constraints of its own tradition, traditional philosophical orientation and concepts cannot always subsume the scope and ideas of Unification Thought. There are numerous insights in Unification Thought that challenge the traditional outlook, orientation, and conceptual constrains in philosophy.
Currently available areas are:
Theoretical treatises:
Unification Ontology Unification Epistemology Unification Logic Unification Methodology
Practical treatises: Unification Ethics Unification Theory of Education Unification Theory of Art
Intermediary treatises: Theory of the Original Human Nature
Resources
Unification Thought Textbooks in English:
Unification Thought Institute, An Introduction to the Thought of Sun Myung Moon: Unification Thought and VOC Theory, New York: HAS-UWC, 2003. The lasted text in English. Abbreviated edition from the original Korean text.
Unification Thought Institute,Essentials of Unification Thought: head-wing thought, Tokyo: UTI, 2002. Older text based upon Dr. Sang Hun Lee’s lecture on Unification Thought.
Major textbook is now available only in Korean and Japanese. English translation is underway.
Reverend Moon’s prayers:
Prayers of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. http://www.unification.org/ucbooks/Prayers/index.html Prayers are good resources in understanding a view of God in Unification Thought.
Links to Reverent Moon’s speeches: http://www.familyfed.org/usa/publications/index.htm
