Claim. Per Divine Principle, love is the emotional force the subject gives to the object and beauty is the emotional force the object returns to the subject, but in united subject-object relations both flow in both directions — so ‘love is found within beauty and beauty is found within love.’
Elaboration. Lee adopts the Divine Principle definition directly (What is Beauty?): love is ‘the emotional force that the subject partner gives to the object partner’ (DP, 38) and beauty is ‘the emotional force that the object partner returns to the subject partner’ (DP, 38). This is structurally elegant — love and beauty are the two directions of a single circuit of give-and-take between subject and object.
A crucial qualification: when the object is a mineral or plant, what comes from the object is a ‘material force,’ but the subject can still receive it as emotional stimulation if disposed to do so. If the subject does not receive the stimulus emotionally, no beauty arises. Therefore beauty is precisely ‘the emotional force, or the emotional stimulation that the object gives to the subject’ — or equivalently, ‘the value of an object that can be felt as an emotional stimulation.’ This phrasing places beauty among the primary values alongside truth and goodness.
The deeper move: in mature subject-object unity, both partners give love and both receive beauty in both directions. ‘When the subject partner and object partner become completely one in harmony, love is found within beauty and beauty is found within love’ (DP, 38). This dissolves any rigid directionality and grounds Lee’s later argument that art and ethics are inseparable — love and beauty are not merely correlated but literally two sides of one coin in the give-and-take circuit.
Lee then triangulates with Plato (beauty as the Idea of beauty in an object, ‘fineness is auditory and visual pleasure’) and Kant (beauty as ‘subjective purposiveness of an object’ — purposiveness imputed by the human subject onto purposeless nature). Lee’s account differs from both: against Plato, beauty is not an objective Idea but is constituted through give-and-take; against Kant, the purposiveness is real (God’s purpose), not merely a human projection, even though the judgment of beauty is subjective. This positions UT aesthetics as a third option that affirms both the objectivity of the elements of beauty (in the object) and the subjectivity of the judgment (in the subject).
See also. beauty-determined-by-give-and-take-not-objectively-existent, love-is-the-source-of-truth-goodness-beauty, joy-arises-from-resemblance-between-subject-and-object