Homo Relationalis and Deficitis Lyubov Bugaeva and John Ryder This is an essay in philosophical anthropology that explores two themes: 1) an understanding of human being as relationally constituted, and 2) the constitutive role of absence in human being. The authors present and explore the general ideas of the American philosopher Justus Buchler and their intersection with those of Nicholas Rescher, Jacques Lacan, Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Gehlen. The authors contend that a relational conception of human being is both plausible and desirable, and that absence or lack is a distinctive constitutive feature of human being. Introduction It is a truism, and on the face of it a rather vacuous one, that societies consist, among other things, or people in various relations with one another. Though obvious enough, this point does suggest that if we are to engage the many philosophical issues concerned with society and social theory, we invariably need some conception of human being, which is to say we need some understanding of what it is to be a person. A society will be understood quite differently if, for example, we choose to understand persons as themselves inherently relational entities rather than, as Adam Smith and many others have, as atoms interacting with one another in private and public spheres. This essay is an exploration of a relational understanding of human being, by which we mean a point of view in which human beings are relationally constituted. In Part I we will describe a general ontology of constitutive relations, as well as what we can call a relational metaphysics of human being. Part II is an illustration of a relational view of human being through the consideration of a specific kind of human trait. The relational constitution of human being, we suggest, is evident in the role of absence in human nature. Part I