Anne Dufourmantelle, _Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living_, trans. Katherine Payne and Vincent Salle

THE ORIGINAL FRENCH version of this book, Puissance de la douceur, was published in 2013; when this translation appeared in 2018, Dufourmantelle, only 54, had already died. Cancer or car accident, I guessed, but it turns out she died while trying to save two children from drowning in the Mediterranean. How many philosophers, or intellectuals in general, have died trying to save another's life? It's a short list, I expect.

Power of Gentleness reminded me of Sianne Ngai's Our Aesthetic Categories. The history of aesthetics largely involves philosophers wrestling with what "beauty" is, or "the sublime," but Ngai upended things and started new conversations by trying to understand the "cute," the "interesting," the "zany." Similarly, while many philosophers have thought about power and duty and necessity, Dufourmantelle started a new conversation by taking up "gentleness." Or douceur--her translators point out in a prefatory note that the French word covers a different semantic landscape than the English word does, as douceur can refer to sweetness and softness as well as mildness or tenderness.

The book is in thirty-six chapters, short essays of two or three pages--the whole book is scarcely over a hundred pages in the Fordham University press edition--all working through the apparent paradox of the title. We tend to associate power with force, but refraining from force also makes things happen. Dufourmantelle makes some unsurprising points along these lines--for instance, about Tolstoy and Gandhi--but also some very surprising ones--for instance, about animals: "So close to animality that it sometimes merges with it, gentleness is experienced to the point of making possible the hypothesis of an instinct that it would call its own." A strange idea--nature, red in  tooth and claw, has a gentleness instinct? But we do see animals being gentle with each other, and where does that come from? Not from having taken an ethics course.

Dufourmantelle offers some important caveats. Gentleness ought not to be confused with "mawkishness," and we should keep in mind that it can be "bastardized into silliness." She notes that "gentleness does not belong only to the good." But we need what it makes possible, as she particularly emphasizes in the section "Justice and Forgiveness" and the final section, "A Gentle Revolution."

I was especially struck by this, in the section titled "Childhood":

We would not survive childhood without gentleness because everything about childhood is so exposed, hyperacute, in a way violent and raw, that gentleness is its absolute prerequisite.