Claim. Hegel’s logic differs fundamentally from formal logic in that it treats the laws and forms of the development of God’s thinking — moving from God thinking about Himself, to Nature, to history and the state, and finally to art, religion, and philosophy.
Elaboration. Sang Hun Lee characterizes Hegel’s project as ‘heavenly logic’ — a description, in Hegel’s own words, of ‘God as He is in His eternal essence before the creation’ (Characteristics of Hegel’s Logic). This is not a theory about human thought (formal logic’s domain) but about God’s thought.
The development proceeds in stages: God first thinks about Himself, then about nature, then about history and the state, then about art, religion, and philosophy. The laws and forms governing this developmental sequence constitute Hegel’s logic. Unlike formal logic, however, the project is not purely formal — Hegel claims to deliver the most universal definitions and laws of the real world.
This framing matters for Unification Thought’s later critique. Lee will accept the ambition — building logic from the structure of God’s pre-creation thinking — but will reject several Hegelian moves: (a) treating Being and Nothing as separable opposites when they should be unified, (b) claiming Idea develops by itself (Unification Thought holds idea is acted upon by intellect/emotion/will centered on purpose), (c) treating nature as God’s self-alienation (collapses toward pantheism), and (d) omitting Heart and the purpose of creation entirely.
The core methodological convergence is that both systems try to derive logic from the pre-creation Logos. The core divergence is what counts as the engine of development: Hegel says contradiction internal to Idea; Lee says give-and-take action between Inner Sungsang and Inner Hyungsang centering on purpose-of-creation grounded in Heart. Critics typically engage on whether Hegel actually held the strong self-development thesis Lee attributes to him.
See also. hegel-being-nothing-becoming-dialectic, hegels-triadic-system-being-essence-notion, logic-is-laws-and-forms-of-thinking