Claim. Every created being and every social development requires a correlative subject-object relationship — internally (principal/subordinate elements) and externally (between individuals) — and no development can take place without such relationships.
Elaboration. The law of correlativity is the first law of creation operating in history (A. Law of Correlativity). It generalizes the dual-characteristics structure of sungsang and hyungsang from the metaphysics of being into the dynamics of history. Two requirements: (1) every individual has internal principal/subordinate elements; (2) every individual externally forms a subject-object relationship with another being.
When the external subject-object pair shares a common purpose, they form a ‘correlative standard’ — a Lee neologism marking the precondition for productive give-and-receive. The historical application is broad: ‘correlative elements of subject and object must form a correlative relationship in every field, such as politics, economy, culture, and science. No development can take place without correlative relationships.’
Lee’s examples span scales: spirit/body, ideology/economic-conditions, government/people, managers/workers, workers/instruments, principal/subordinate parts in a machine. The breadth signals an ontological universality claim — the same structural principle organizes physics, biology, society, and history.
The polemical edge is anti-Marxist: where dialectical materialism privileges contradiction (subject vs. subject) as engine of development, UT insists development requires harmonious correlation (subject with object). Struggle does not develop; only correlative give-and-receive develops. This sets up the next law (give-and-receive) and the later distinction between development (law of give-and-receive) and turning (laws of repulsion, indemnity, separation).
The claim is structurally similar to systems-theoretic accounts of emergence requiring complementary components, but UT grounds it theologically: the correlativity reflects God’s own internal sungsang/hyungsang and the polarity of all being. Critics from counter perspectives engage on whether the categorization of all relationships as ‘subject-object’ isn’t itself a tendentious reading that pre-rules out genuinely peer interactions.
See also. law-of-repulsion-as-good-evil-struggle, ut-correlatives-vs-opposites, give-and-receive-is-harmonious-not-struggle