| “Relationality” | RB is not simply another name for contemporary relationality. Relationality encompasses many different philosophical, anthropological, political, theological, and metaphysical approaches. RB makes a specific claim about human being and psychic organization. |
| Metaphysics | RB is not a metaphysical proposition about the ultimate structure of Reality. It does not require a transcendent ground, cosmic unity, universal consciousness, divine source, or other invisible ontology. |
| Universality | The human capacity for RB does not mean that everything shares an underlying essence or that all things are universally connected. |
| Interconnection | “Everything is connected” is not an account of RB. RB concerns the human capacity to exist within webs of relationship, not a proposition that everything in the universe is connected. |
| Permanence | RB is not an eternal or immutable human state. Our capacity for RB can be profoundly suppressed, distorted, or transformed by historical conditions. |
| Transcendence | RB does not require transcending embodied existence. Return occurs within embodied human life, not through ascent beyond it. |
| Heideggerian concepts | RB is not Being, Dasein, authenticity, Being-in-the-world, or another formulation of Heideggerian ontology. It arises from a different account of human being and history. |
| Psychological concepts | RB is not a psychological state, personality type, therapeutic condition, attachment style, or mode of cognition. |
| Anthropology | RB is not simply an anthropological understanding of humans through culture, relationships, embodiment, or situatedness. Anthropology provides important evidence about human life but does not itself constitute RB. |
| Communitarianism | RB is not an argument that the individual should be subordinated to the community. It does not begin from the political opposition between individual and community. |
| Anarchy | RB does not entail anarchy or predict that people living in RB would create an anarchist society. |
| Hunter-gatherer romanticism | Return does not mean returning historically to hunter-gatherer existence. Hunter-gatherer life provides important evidence about human beings before CIV, but contemporary humans remain contemporary humans. |
| Primitivism | RB does not require rejecting complexity, knowledge, technology, or abstraction in favor of a supposedly simpler past. |
| Individualism | RB does not preserve the isolated, self-sufficient, consciously self-constituting individual characteristic of the PI. The RB person remains a distinct individual while existing within webs of relationship. |
| Collectivism | RB does not dissolve the person into a group, society, class, community, species, or collective consciousness. |
| New Age spirituality | RB is not a claim that “we are all connected” and does not require energy fields, vibrations, cosmic consciousness, spiritual awakening, or similar propositions. |
| Eastern religious traditions | RB may have points of contact with aspects of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and other traditions, but it is not a religious teaching and does not depend upon religious doctrine or revelation. |
| Therapy / self-help | RB is not primarily a technique for making the existing CIV individual happier, more productive, or better adjusted. |
| Authenticity | RB is not simply “being your authentic self.” The idea of an authentic individual can itself remain within the conceptual structure of the PI. |
| Freedom | RB is not maximal individual choice. The formal freedom of the autonomous chooser is itself a historically specific conception of the individual. |
| Humanism | RB shares humanism’s concern with human flourishing but does not depend upon the autonomous, rational, self-directing individual as the fundamental human subject. |
| Posthumanism | RB does not require overcoming, abandoning, or technologically or theoretically transcending the human. |
| Ecology | RB has profound ecological implications, but it is not itself an ecological philosophy. Ecological interconnectedness alone does not establish RB. |
| Political program | RB does not prescribe a political system. It is deliberately non-predictive about what a world in which RB became pervasive would look like. |