When human interactions are based on a confrontation of interests, the idea of gentleness seems to have no place. This is easy to understand if we restrict it to the realm of sensation (“the sweetness of a perfume”) or intimacy (“the sweetness of rest”), all the more so if, when interests are at stake, we equate it with naivety or weakness. What’s more, numerous examples, particularly geopolitical ones, seem to rule out the practical value of gentleness, and the fact that political leaders can express brutal, cruel and unjust intentions with gentleness, and without scruples, further discredits it. But gentleness is not just a value: it is also a disposition of character, a virtue, which has practical effects, including at the political level (1).
Not only can gentleness be used for calculation, it can also be feigned. Jacqueline de Romilly observed that “one can be gentle to serve or to enslave” (2), and many thinkers and politicians have warned against the negative effects of false gentleness. For example, Demosthenes (381-322 B.C.), a great orator of antiquity, alerted the Greeks to the deceptive words of Philip of Macedon. In 338 B.C., after the battle of Chaeronea, which saw the defeat of the Greek armies, he said:
“It was the misfortune of others to suffer that savagery which Philip displayed once he had people entirely in his power, while it was our good fortune to reap the fruits of the clemency [philanthrōpia] in which he draped himself as he schemed for the future. But I pass over this.” (3)
Montaigne observed that we could “baptise public vices with new milder names to excuse them,” prompting Pierre Servet to observe that “gentleness conceals and, in the dialectic of being and appearing, plays the role of a mask” (4). And Pascal saw gentleness as “the ideal means of investing the other person’s consciousness and communicating certainties,” in the words of Jean-Pierre Landry (5). In particular, it enables us to convince another person by making them believe that they themselves are the author of the belief we are trying to inculcate. In a recent article on soft power, Philip Golub noted that “it is obviously better to make others conform to your preferences by making them desire them than to force them to obey” (6).
Such a perspective has its limits, however. Jacqueline de Romilly evokes the “misfortune of the tyrant,” whose power is, by definition, exercised arbitrarily and violently. She cites the rhetorician Isocrates (436-338 B.C.), who observed that tyrants are “forced to make war upon all their fellow-citizens, to hate those at whose hands they have suffered no wrong, to distrust their friends and companions, and to confide the protection of their persons to hirelings whom they have never even seen, and yet are not a whit less afraid of those who protect them than of those who conspire against them, and are so suspicious of all that they do not even approach their nearest relatives with a feeling of security” (7). It is therefore in a political leader’s interest to be gentle with his constituents:
“To avoid falling into the same evils, kings must avoid everything that can give rise to hostility. They must be just; they must also be gentle.” (8)
This implies the search for a “humanised justice,” in which equity comes into play in the application of laws. Aristotle said that “equitable man [has] especially sympathetic understanding” and that “we say that it is fair, in certain cases, to have the sense to forgive” (9), which is tantamount to recognising the importance of “a more indulgent justice, superior to the justice of laws, [signalling] the triumph of one of the forms of gentleness” (10).
When Jacqueline de Romilly notes that, according to Isocrates, kings “must be gentle,” this implies that they must not feign gentleness. In other words, the gentleness of their conduct, and not just of their words, must be sincere. It is on this condition that gentleness appears to be equivalent to “goodness of heart, [a] quality of the soul that disposes it to accept everything with a calm inspired by goodness,” a dictionary definition to which is added a quotation attributed to Helvétius: “Gentleness attracts affection” (11). One of the properties of gentleness, when manifested in interpersonal relationships, is indeed to attract “the sympathy, fidelity and devotion of those who are its object,” which constitutes “an underlying argument in favor of gentleness” (12).
The condition of sincerity, which enables gentleness to be effective, is easier to satisfy if we consider gentleness as a virtue. Indeed, a virtue can be defined as “a permanent disposition to desire to perform a given kind of moral act” (13). It follows that the possession and exercise of a virtue must lead the agent to behave according to this disposition.
Aristotle sees the virtue of gentleness as the middle term between an excess (anger) and a defect (indifference): “our condition in relation to anger is bad, if our anger is too violent or not violent enough, but if it is moderate, our condition is good” (14). Gentleness is therefore an intermediate disposition, a “state midway” that does not exclude anger, but is an appropriate response to situations where anger or indifference may be activated (15).
But defining this virtue in terms of such situations doesn’t capture the “vast scope” and “richness” of gentleness, in the words of Jacqueline de Romilly (16). Depending on the type of social interaction under consideration, it can encompass different values: “kindness of manner,” “benevolence,” “generosity,” “goodness,” “humanity and almost charity.” In political life, “it can be tolerance, or clemency, depending on whether it concerns relations between citizens, or subjects, or the vanquished.” Similarly, Matthew Christ points out that Demosthenes used the word “gentleness” “to connote not only ‘humanity,’ ‘generosity,’ and ‘kindness,’ but also the ‘civility,’ ‘sociability,’ and ‘tolerance’ that hold the city together” (17).
Behind the flexibility of the virtue of gentleness, we nevertheless find a common idea, a unity (18). Jacqueline de Romilly defines this common core as a “disposition to welcome others as persons to whom one wishes good.” Gentleness “makes possible the easygoing and tolerant daily relations of members of the [people] with one another,” according to Matthew Christ, and is even the “mark, and preserver of, a civilized society in which relations are based on reciprocity and fairness” (19). In particular, it contributes to the preservation and development of democracy.
Conceiving of gentleness as a virtue has at least two implications for our purpose.
The first is that, if gentleness can be feigned or used tactically, particularly rhetorically, to convince or manipulate others, it is because we are sensitive to it, because it responds to a psychological disposition “to accept everything with a calm inspired by goodness.” If we are so sensitive to it, we can exercise it beyond our personal relationships.
The second consequence is precisely that gentleness can be extended to democratic political life. According to Christ, Demosthenes, in the Athens of the 4th century B.C., claimed that gentleness “permeat[es] the democratic city’s institutions, laws, and citizen relations.” But contemporary conceptions also rank it among the political virtues, even if it is not mentioned by name. John Rawls, for example, includes in his political conception of justice as fairness “toleration and mutual respect, and a sense of fairness and civility,” as well as the virtue of “reasonableness” – a set of qualities he calls the “virtues of fair social cooperation” (20).
Political science professor Frédéric Ramel argues that, in international politics, benevolence – one of the synonyms for gentleness – is not a substitute for power, but “a kind of glue, a cement that primarily serves to encourage civility” (21). He specifies its function as follows:
“[It’s primarily about] avoiding unnecessary conflicts when the other cooperates, being open if once partner prioritises an end to cooperation and being forgiving after responding to a provocation, being transparent to encourage adaptation from other players.”
This kind of gentleness is suitable for international relations, but it is not substantially different from the gentleness that is morally advisable in personal relationships. Of course, it can always be feigned – it’s enough, one might say, to control one’s anger and play a role. However, the self-control and insistence on sincerity that characterise it, as indeed they characterise the other virtues, represent such strong constraints that they are likely to discourage attempts to deceive in matters of gentleness.
References
(1) This article takes elements from a recent euradio’s Philosophy Column entitled “La douceur peut payer, y compris dans les relations internationales,” which was broadcast on 20 April 2025.
(2) J. de Romilly, La douceur dans la pensée grecque, Les Belles Lettres, 1979. All other Jacqueline de Romilly quotes come from this book.
(3) Demosthenes, On the crown, in J. J. Murphy (ed.), Demosthenes’ On the crown. Rhetorical perspectives, Southern Illinois University Press, 2016.
(4) Montaigne, The complete Essays, translated by D. M. Frame, and P. Servet, “Douceurs de Montaigne,” Cahiers du GADGES, 1, Le doux aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Écriture, esthétique, politique, spiritualité, 2003, pp. 81-95.
(5) J.-P. Landry, “Pascal et la douceur. Une rêverie herméneutique sur les Pensées,” Le doux aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Écriture, esthétique, politique, spiritualité, 2003, pp. 117-127.
(6) P. S. Golub, “Les masques du ‘soft power’. Quand les États-Unis prétendaient séduire plutôt que dominer », Le Monde diplomatique, 1st April 2025.
(7) The Isocrates quote comes from his speech On Peace (356 B.C.).
(8) J. de Romilly, op. cit.
(9) Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, translated by M. Ostwald, Bobbs-Merrill, 1962.
(10) J. de Romilly, op. cit.
(11) C. Augé (dir.), Nouveau Larousse illustré. Dictionnaire universel encyclopédique, Tome 3, 1897-1904. The exact wording is: “mildness attracts attention.” We replace “mildness” with “gentleness.”
(12) J. de Romilly, op. cit. Among other arguments in favor of gentleness is that of Baron D’Holbach (to whom Helvétius’s formula quoted above should certainly be attributed):
“Every thing would have joined in evidence to convince him of the unreasonable tyranny, of the unjust violence, of the useless cruelty of those men of blood, who persecute, who destroy mankind, in order that they may mould him to their own peculiar opinions; every thing would have conducted mortals to mildness, to indulgence, to toleration; virtues, unquestionably of more real importance, much more necessary to the welfare of society, than the marvellous speculations by which it is divided, by which it is frequently hurried on to sacrifice to a maniacal fury, the pretended enemies to these revered flights of the imagination.”
(The system of nature or, the laws of the moral and physical world, 1770.)
(13) A. Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, 18th ed., PUF, 1996. There are other definitions of virtue, such as this one by Rosalind Hursthouse, which we’ve already discussed elsewhere: “A virtue is a character trait a human being needs to flourish or live well” (“Virtue theory and abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 20, 1991, pp. 223-246; see, in French: “Quelques cas concrets autour de l’éthique de la vertu,” 25 July 2014).
(14) Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, op. cit.
(15) Aristotle, The Eudemian Ethics, translated by H. Rackham, Harvard University Press, 1938.
(16) J. de Romilly, op. cit.
(17) M. R. Christ, “Demosthenes on philanthrōpia as a democratic virtue,” Classical Philology, 108, 2013, pp. 202-222. Philanthrōpia is one of the Greek terms for gentleness – more precisely, feelings of humanity and kindness, love of humankind. Other words referring to gentleness correspond to the ability to control violence (gentleness is then, for Jacqueline de Romilly, “the virtue of those who might be tempted to use force or violence, i.e. those who hold a form of power”), understanding, clemency or equity. (18) “Flexibility” is used both by Jacqueline de Romilly and Matthew Christ (in the latter case, in reference to Demosthenes).
(19) Christ refers to the way Demosthenes described the Athenian city of the 4th century B.C..
(20) J. Rawls, Political liberalism, Columbia University Press, 1993.
(21) F. Ramel, “Benevolence and international relations,” 14 December 2022.
To cite this article: Alain Anquetil, “‘Gentleness is the mark of a civilized society’,” The Philosophy and Business Ethics Blog, 29 April 2025.
