The tragic personal, national, and global conflicts which inflict us as people today are all the very baleful consequences of our shriveled relation to life. As our paper will show, the idea of the human person as the relational animal par-excellence has been shattered in our time, replaced by a modal and minimal self, off on its own hook, lost without a living community, self-absorbed, privatistic, and without a real sense of its history or of the educative value of accrued wisdom. No longer do we as people hold with Martin Buber that “in the beginning is the relation” and that “all real living is meeting” without conflict: isolation not relation is the metaphor pivotally institutionalized in our Western culture. Whether capitalism or technology is at bottom to blame for our relational poverty, our societies and our personal lives are lacerated with conflicts which originate in the monadic character of daily life.

 We shall diagnose this devolution from community to narcissism, from solidarity to self-encapsulation, pointing out the harmful moral and social consequences that resulted from this tragic regression. We then suggest a doctrine of relations which, in our judgment, is both nutritious and redemptive. Specifically, we will show how the various moral, social, and political conflicts are improved once a relational paradigm is substituted for the myth of individualism so peculiar to our contemporary cultures. The crisis in relational living, however, and the conflicts which usually go along with it are resolvable, we claim, only by metaphysical re-examination and by commitment to and a celebration of the pedagogical value of relations. Only this way will we move effectively toward a solution of the great moral, social, and political conflicts of our time.  

The intellectual context for our argument is grounded in the thoughts of the Zionist existential philosopher Martin Buber, and the French post-modernist philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. What is needed, both argued, is a return to origins, back to the roots of human experience which as Buber emphasizes is purposefully relational, and hence back to the peaceful beginnings where, as Levinas argues, we can see peace from the perspective of peace rather than from the perspective of war, as is now the case.

Bringing our everyday experience back to the original encounter requires an existential transformation of all individuals and nations. Only thusly can we establish a way out of our enduring and purposeless lives and into a constructive state of relational harmony. Both Buber and Levinas help us, albeit in different ways, to understand that the original relation, which precedes ontology, differentiations, and even cognition, is the face to face encounter that opens up the possibility of understanding human experience more constructively.  As Levinas correctly observed, scrutinizing the concepts of justice, peace, and human rights from the perspective of the ego "make it clear that we have not yet grasped their true nature."