Voltaire at Frederick the Great’s Sanssouci, by Pierre Charles Baquoy

“The sense of dialectic requires a critical perspective on the Enlightenment; the sense of responsibility requires admiration for it. To deny either of these terms is to risk sinking into superficial veneration or shallow hatred. Every age wishes to construct a new ideal. But, to be an insurgent, one must also be an heir. The Enlightenment is the inheritance once must accept in order to revolt against the present.”

Daniel Gordon, Postmodernism and the Enlightenment, (Routledge,  2001), 219-220.

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