Philosophy
Modern war and modern love are both shaped by the same dangerous fantasy: that strength means staying untouched.
The World We Are Living In
In 2024 and 2025, we are still watching something philosophically precise happening in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan, in Lebanon and closer home too. What is being performed, repeatedly, by states and their representatives, is invulnerability as virtue. The language of power in wartime is almost always the language of imperviousness: we will not stop, we will not yield, we will not feel the weight of what we are doing. Grief is enemy propaganda. Doubt is disloyalty. Empathy for the other side is naivety at best, treason at worst.
Judith Butler, writing after 9/11 in Precarious Life, noticed something that has only become more urgent since: states decide, selectively, whose losses are grievable. The deaths that appear on the front pages with names, photographs, ages, and grieving families. And the deaths that appear as numbers, or do not appear at all. This is not accidental. It is the operation of what Butler calls a frame: a perceptual structure that determines what we are permitted to see as a loss and therefore what we are permitted to feel as grief. When a government refuses to count civilian deaths, or disputes the numbers, or frames them as the responsibility of the enemy, it is not making an empirical claim. It is making an ontological one. Those lives, it is saying, are not fully real. Their vulnerability does not generate the same moral claim on us. The invulnerability myth requires this hierarchy because if all vulnerabilities were equally acknowledged, the conduct of modern war would become philosophically impossible to sustain.
This is what I mean when I say vulnerability is the most neglected concept in moral and political philosophy. The dominant tradition has treated it as peripheral, as the soft underbelly of ethics rather than its foundation. And the consequences of that omission are now, quite literally, visible from space.
Butler’s claim is not that we should feel more, or that emotion is more reliable than reason. It is something more structural. She argues that vulnerability is not a contingent feature of some lives, the weak, the poor, the unlucky. It is the ontological condition of every life lived in a body, in a world, in relation to others. We are all, without exception, fundamentally exposed. We can be touched. We can be hurt. We can lose the people and things that partially constitute us. This is not a weakness. It is anatomy. It is what Heidegger might have called a fundamental existential something that belongs to the structure of human existence as such, not to any individual failure. And to acknowledge it is not to collapse into it. It is to begin with an honest account of what we are.
Emmanuel Levinas approaches the same insight from a different angle. The encounter with the Other, with the face of another person, is always an exposure. The face is not a surface; it is an address. It arrives before you have prepared a response. It places a demand on you that you did not choose and cannot calculate. And this interruption, this moment of being undone slightly by another person’s reality, is, Levinas argues, the beginning of ethics. Not its obstacle. The very ground from which ethics becomes possible.
Put Butler and Levinas together, and we have something powerful: vulnerability is not the pre-ethical state that philosophy needs to transcend. It is the condition under which ethics becomes thinkable at all. We cannot care about justice if nothing can hurt you. We cannot love if nothing is at stake. The invulnerable agent, the Stoic sage, the Kantian rational will, the liberal self-sufficient individual, is not the ideal of moral life. She is its evacuation.
Vulnerability in Love: The Closest Test
I want to come closer in now. Because nowhere is the confusion between vulnerability and weakness more acute, more costly, and more intimate than in love.
To love someone, genuinely, not as a transaction or a managed risk, is to let them matter. It is to say, without necessarily saying it: you can hurt me. Not because you are cruel, but because I have allowed you to be real to me. And this is terrifying. The whole apparatus of contemporary romantic life- who texts first, who needs less, who cares less, the performance of casual availability is a vast and exhausting project of appearing invulnerable while also, somehow, being loved. Which is a contradiction so obvious and so universal that we have simply stopped noticing it.
We have been in relationships where the governing principle was mutual invulnerability. Where both people were performing self-sufficiency so carefully that nothing real could pass between them. It was not unkind. It was not dishonest in any obvious way. But it was hollow in the way that only becomes visible in retrospect- when we realise that years passed and we were never actually seen, and neither were they, because seeing requires exposure, and exposure had been quietly ruled out of bounds.
A Personal Side: What I notice, looking back, is that the moments of genuine intimacy, the ones that remain as real years later, were always moments of involuntary vulnerability. A moment of crying when I hadn’t planned to. A moment of admitting something I found embarrassing. A moment of saying I don’t know. These are not the moments I managed. They are the moments management failed. And they were, without exception, the moments when something true happened between two people. I wonder if it is the same with you, too!