Claim. Joy in aesthetic experience arises when the inner nature (Sungsang) and outer form (Hyungsang) of the object reflect and resemble those of the subject, which is why God created humans in His image and all things to resemble Him symbolically.
Elaboration. Lee derives the resemblance principle from Divine Principle: ‘Joy arises when we have an object partner in which our internal nature and external form are reflected and developed. Our object partner helps us to feel our own internal nature and external form through the stimulation it gives’ (citing DP, 33; see Art and Joy). This is offered as a general principle of subject-object joy, not a special aesthetic rule, and it is used to explain why God created humans ‘in image’ (full resemblance to His dual-characteristics) and all things ‘symbolically’ (partial resemblance) (I. Divine Principle Foundation for the Theory of Art).
Applied to art, this yields two operational consequences. (1) An artist creates a work that resembles the artist’s own Sungsang and Hyungsang in order to obtain joy from it as an object — meaning artworks are unavoidably self-portraits at some level. (2) An appreciator feels joy when sensing his or her own Sungsang and Hyungsang in the work — meaning aesthetic response is essentially recognition of self in the other. Lee will unpack this into resemblance in Sungsang (thought, plan, heart) and resemblance in Hyungsang (form, color, sound, odor matching internal prototypes).
The principle does important work: it explains why artworks move us at all, grounds the later ‘encapsulation of the universe’ epistemology (every Sungsang and Hyungsang already exists latently in the human body as prototypes), and pre-empts a relativist account of beauty by anchoring the joy-response in objective correspondence. It also creates space for complementarity as a kind of resemblance (resemblance to one’s image of what one lacks), which Lee will use to explain why opposites attract without abandoning the resemblance framework.
Critics will press: doesn’t this make all art narcissism — finding ourselves in everything? Lee’s implicit reply is that since human beings are ‘encapsulations of the universe,’ finding oneself in art is simultaneously finding the universe and ultimately God, so the recognition is not narcissistic but cosmological.
See also. complementarity-as-deeper-resemblance, beauty-as-emotional-stimulation-returned-from-object, prototypes-require-purity-of-mind-and-education