Unification Thought
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 of Unification Thought. Although Unification Thought is Reverend Moon's thought, for some unification scholars the term alternatively designates Dr. Lee's philosophical development of Reverend Moon's thought. Dr. Lee's work does not exhaust Reverend Moon's thought, which continues to develop, yet it provides a basic philosophical outline. Unification Thought serves as a philosophical basis for social, political, economic, religious, and cultural activities.
The term unification in Unification Thought has two meanings. First, it expresses a passion for the ideal of unity. Since the beginning of human history, the world, from personal life to global affairs, has been chaotic and divided. Conflicts and struggle on all levels have become a stumbling block to the achievement of the peace, harmony, and happiness humanity has been longing for. Unification Thought promotes the ideal of leading the world from its present reality of struggle and destructive conflict to one of reconciliation, peace, and harmony. Unification Thought pursues the ideal of saving humankind with a messianic zeal aimed at achieving harmonious unity on all levels of our personal and social lives. Second, the term unification describes the fundamental characteristics of this thought. There is an internal unity that integrates the various sections constituting Unification Thought. Unification Thought encompasses theories on God, human nature, nature, ethics, art, education, knowledge, logic, method, and history. These branches of thought are integrated into a uniform whole by a consistent application of a number of key insights.
While Hegel and Marx had developed philosophy as a system that includes a theory of history, Western philosophies in the 20th century have rejected the notion of philosophy as a systematic thought. Both analytic philosophy and phenomenology define philosophy as a methodology and do not include a theory of history as one of its components. A lack of historical perspective has limited their social impact. Western philosophy has become highly methodological and this tendency is still pervasive today. Marxism, on the other hand, has appeared as a system of thought filled with messianic idealism and the promise to liberate humans from oppression and suffering. Thus, it has had the strongest social impact in the 20th century. Due to its wrong assumptions, however, Marxism has failed. Unification Thought, on the other hand, is a systematic thought built upon theistic assumptions and filled with messianic passion and idealism.
Presuppositions
Unification Thought is built upon two assumptions: God's existence and the existence of a spirit world or life after death. Unlike other theistic thinkers such as Anselm, Kant, and Kierkegaard, Unification Thought does not explore possible paths towards a proof of the existence of God and the 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 a task to be explored.
Framework
The four major concepts that constitute Unification Thought are: God, the Purpose of Creation, the Interdependence of Beings, and Give-and-Take Action.
God
The notion of God as the Creator forms the central axis of Unification Thought. At the age of sixteen, Reverend Moon experienced a dramatic encounter with God and Jesus. In that revelation, God disclosed to him his suffering heart caused by the sufferings of humankind. It is the heart of God that moved Reverent Moon to take on a Messianic role to save humankind and led him to his lifelong journey of restoring the world back to the original world of Creation. At the core of Reverend Moon's discourse 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 by them. The Unificationist culture, built upon God's heart, is thus called a culture of heart. [edit]
The Purpose of Creation
God created human beings as his eternal partners of love who can embody, substantialize, and share his love. Within God’s realm of heart, God and human beings co-create. Human beings are to responsibly care for the natural environment, manage it, and establish a spring-type civilization. The realization of a world of eternal joy and happiness is God's purpose for creating the world. Accordingly, this purpose of creation precedes the existence of all beings and all human activities such as thinking, knowing, 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 the Three Great Blessings. These three components are the perfection of the individual, the multiplication of children, and the dominion over creation. The first individual goal is to perfect one's character by inheriting God's true love and by becoming an embodiment of truth.
The second goal is to form an ideal family and to co-create the Four Realms of Heart with God. While the formation of one's family serves as a basis, the concept of family in Unification Thought is extended to the national, global, and cosmic levels. God's love manifested in the family is applied to the global and cosmic realms. Unification Thought conceives the world as a global family.
The third goal is to develop and exercise creativity and properly manage all creation. Hence, the care of nature and the thoughtful development of culture, society, and the environment represent the third goal.
The Interdependence of Reciprocal Beings
Love can only exist through relationships. While God is self-existent and transcendent, He created human beings as his eternal partners of love. Therefore, God and human beings are mutually interdependent. The interdependence of God and human beings has decisive effects on both of them. No matter how much love God has or even if God exists as love itself, as long as human beings are sorrowful and suffer, He will be equally sorrowful, if not more; he suffers as human beings’ eternal parent. In Unification Thought, therefore, God is absolute and relative, transcendent and historical. While God's love in itself is absolute and self-subsistent and not affected by anything else, God’s heart is affected by the heart of human beings. In other words, God can be joyful or sorrowful because he is love and he loves human beings. If God was indifferent to human beings, he would neither suffer 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 also interdependent in another sense. God's love remains hidden from the world until it is manifested through human beings. The family is the basic unit where his love is manifested. God's love is substantialized through parental love towards children, conjugal love between husband and wife, children's love towards parents, and love among siblings. The three objective love displays a basic pattern of how God's love is realized in the world. The family, in Unification Thought, is the basic unit of society, because individuals can cultivate heart and embody God's love in an interactive exchange of love among the members of the family. God's love, as embodied in one's family, is then extended to social relationships, leading to the creation of a culture of heart. The principle of the interdependence of reciprocal beings pervades the entire world. Internal character and external form in individual beings, masculinity and femininity, human beings and nature, beings in nature and the universe, all exist under this principle. This principle manifests itself in the social, political, and economical realms as the Ideals of Interdependence, Mutual Prosperity, and Universally Shared Values. These ideals are also manifested in various forms through the vision of the Unification Movement aimed at building the world for the coming centuries.
Give-and-Take Action
God gave existence to human beings and other beings in the universe out of his love. Human beings and other things receive their being as a gift. Giving and receiving is the very origin of the world. Likewise, in human life, parents participate in the process of giving being or life to new individuals. Each individual receives his or her being in this way. The principle of give-and-take, thus, characterizes the origin of existence, God, who in turn represents the archetype of the notion of give-and-take. In the universe, this archetype is modified in a variety of ways. 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 give-and-take action. Unification methodology universally applies these concepts to all interactive relationships.
Precedence of giving over receiving in the give-and-take action implies the spirit of serving others. Unification Thought expresses its essence in the motto, "living for the sake of others." The altruistic spirit of service of Unification Thought is embodied in the concept of give-and-take, and this concept underlies all service activities, as well as the movement for peace in Unificationism.
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 to varying degrees. Since human beings are the objective partners of God, they manifest God's nature in the highest degree and to the fullest extent. Human beings are God's substantial objects 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 cannot 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 the natural world under the condition that they embody God's love and manage nature with care and love. The absence or distortion of love in human beings causes the destruction of both human society and the natural environment.
Key Ontological Principles
From Plato and Aristotle onward, the dipolar concept of form and matter has served in various forms as one of the key concepts in Western philosophy. In the tradition of Far Eastern thought, the dipolar concept of yin and yang has equally served as a central concept since antiquity. In Unification Thought, these two key concepts from the traditions of East and West are integrated within a 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.
The Dual Characteristics of Internal Character and External Form
Every being is understood as the integral unity of the dual characteristics of internal character (Sungsang in Korean) and external form (Hyungsang in Korean). Individual human beings are seen as the unity of mind and body or spiritual and physical nature (soul and flesh). In other words, each individual exits as a spiritual-physical unit. Human experiences, therefore, are both spiritual and physical at the same time. When one sees a flower for example, one experiences meaning and values along with the sense perception. Visual images stimulate the human body and physiological changes then occur in the human body. Together with these physical phenomena, mental or spiritual aspects of the experience, such as emotional feelings, memories, values, meanings, and other associated interpretive factors constitute our experience. Each particular experience is that of a psycho-somatic unity. Language is seen as the unity of sense and sounds, or written expressions. 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 spirituality and economy, religion or values and science, and spirit world and earthly world. From matters of personal life to global affairs, this principle allows us to see phenomena from the viewpoint of polarity. Just like human beings are the interactive unit of spirit and body, phenomena have both spiritual/mental/value aspects and physical/bodily aspects. Unification Thought also conceives this duality as that between internal and external, invisible and visible.
In human life, however, there is serious conflict between the spiritual and the physical aspects. There is a domination of the spiritual desire for values by the physical desire, or lust. Physical desires or lust often dominate the individual and economic perspectives dominate society. The power of the physical realm , e.g., 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), the individual has to be empowered by becoming the embodiment of true love and society has to be empowered through 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 individuals and in society.
The Dual Characteristics of Yin and Yang
Additionally, beings also come to exist, and phenomena take place, through another principle of duality. It is the principle of the dual characteristics of yin and yang. Human beings exist in pairs as men and women. The interdependent duality or polarity of man and woman is the archetype of yin and yang. As described above, 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, the conjugal love between them manifests God's love on the next stage. Conjugal love becomes the source of new life. The sexuality of human beings is originally the channel through which God's love works as the power to produce new beings. In this sense, sexual activity is a highly spiritual activity. Just as in the case of man and woman, the principle of yin and yang also determines how beings in the natural world come to exist. The duality of male and female, as well as that of positive and negative electric charges, are the manifestation of this same principle in nature.
Like Far Eastern yin-yang philosophy, Unification Thought conceives the polar articulation of being in cases such as high and low, up and down, convex and concave, light and shadow, movement and tranquility, dynamic and static, as a manifestation of the yin-yang principle. In Unification Thought, the 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 presenting a holistic perspective. Analyses, developments, studies and applications of ideas of Unification Thought are still underway. What is available in Unification literature today only represents a basic summary of Reverent Moon’s thought. There are numerous themes and topics that have not yet been adequately explored.
Since philosophy has developed and been shaped in particular forms by the constraints of its own tradition, the traditional philosophical orientation and its concepts cannot always encompass the full scope and all the ideas of Unification Thought. There are numerous insights in Unification Thought that challenge the traditional outlook, orientation, and conceptual constrains of philosophy.
Printed material is available for the following areas: Expositions on theoretical issues: Unification Ontology, Unification Epistemology, Unification Logic, Unification Methodology. Expositions on practical issues: Unification Ethics, Unification Theory of Education, Unification Theory of Art. Expositions on intermediary issues: Theory of the Original Human Nature
Resources
Unification Thought Textbooks in English:
Research Institute for the Integration of World Thought, An Introduction to the Thought of Sun Myung Moon: Unification Thought and VOC Theory, New York: HSA-UWC, 2003. The most recent English text. 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 lectures on Unification Thought. http://unification.org/ucbooks/euth/index.html
The main textbook is presently available in Korean and Japanese only. The English translation is in progress.
Reverend Moon’s prayers:
Prayers of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. http://www.unification.org/ucbooks/Prayers/index.html Prayers are good resources in understanding the view of God in Unification Thought.
Links to Reverend Moon’s speeches: http://www.familyfed.org/usa/publications/index.htm
