Claim. Each human being’s unique individuality — manifested in appearance, behavior, and creative activity — derives from God’s Individual Image rather than from environmental accident, which is why every person has supreme value and gives unique stimulating joy to God.
Elaboration. Lee argues that animals and plants have individual images differentiated only by species, but human individuality is differentiated per individual person — every face among six billion is recognizably different (C. A Being of Individuality). This is by divine design: “God endowed each human being with such a particular individual image so that He might obtain, from him or her, a unique, stimulating joy.”
The three manifestations of individuality:
- Appearance — the unique characteristic of one’s Hyungsang.
- Behavior — the unique characteristic of one’s Sungsang (behavior being direct mind-manifestation).
- Creative activity — not only artistic but any activity expressing creativity. “If one lives one day to its fullest, expressing his or her creativity in everything they do, the footprints of that day become a work of art.”
God’s response to each individual is aesthetic delight: “the beauty of appearance, the beauty of behavior, and the beauty of creative activity” — parental delight in a child as the structural analogy.
The polemical target is explicit: Communism (specifically Marxist materialism) reduces individuality to a product of environment, which is why Communist regimes systematically crushed individuality and trampled human rights. Lee identifies this as the philosophical root of dictatorial human-rights violations — not contingent leadership pathology but a logical consequence of materialist anthropology.
Humanism, by contrast, defended individuality but “had no philosophical answer as to why human individuality must be respected” and so could not defeat Communism intellectually. Unification Thought claims to supply the missing rationale: individuality is precious because it is God-derived. The argument has clear apologetic force against any framework that grounds human dignity in social construction; whether it works against secular dignity-frameworks (Kantian autonomy, capabilities approach) is a separate question.
See also. individual-image-as-uniqueness-from-inner-hyungsang, ut-individual-image-vs-environment, absolute-value-preserves-individuality