Claim. In forming an outer four position foundation, a person enters into give-and-receive relations in six directions — above (parents, superiors, elders), below (children, subordinates, juniors), front (teachers, senior colleagues, leaders), back (students, junior colleagues, followers), right (siblings, intimate friends/colleagues), and left (competitors, opponents, strangers).
Elaboration. Lee gives a relational geometry of personhood (A. What Is a Connected Being?). The ‘original way of human life is to form harmonious relationships in all six directions.’ The schema generalizes beyond persons — ‘the same thing can be said about all things as well’ — but the six categories are paradigmatically interpersonal.
The scheme has several distinctive features. (1) Vertical relations (above/below) are hierarchical in the traditional Confucian sense: parents and children, superiors and subordinates. (2) Front/back relations are pedagogical and directional: teachers, leaders ahead; students, followers behind. (3) Right/left contain a notable asymmetry: right is intimacy (siblings, close friends) while left explicitly includes competitors, opponents, and strangers. This last category is striking — the original ideal includes harmonious relation with adversaries, not just elimination of adversity.
This six-direction structure does several things in UT. It generalizes the four-position-foundation from triadic God-centered relations to a full social geometry. It supplies a positive vision against Marxist class-struggle by claiming that even adversarial relations (left direction) are meant to be harmonized, not abolished. And it grounds family ethics as the paradigm of all social relations — the family naturally instantiates the vertical (parents/children) and right-horizontal (siblings) axes, and extends to the front/back and left axes through social life.
The move also has implications for blessing theology: the Blessed Family stands at the center-point of all six directions and is the locus through which the entire web is properly ordered. Critics from sociology will note the schema is more taxonomic than explanatory — it labels relations but does not predict their dynamics.
See also. ut-connected-being-dual-purposes, ut-individual-truth-being-vs-connected-being, downward-love-primary-induces-upward-and-horizontal