“The truth is that no thinker worth remembering has some monolithic ‘project’ to undertake…”

The truth is that no thinker worth remembering has some monolithic “project” to undertake; all express a personality inevitably double, and full of the tensions and contradictions that touch any real life. Voltaire was greedy, entrepreneurial, self-advancing; he was also altruistic, courageous, and generous. He spread Enlightenment ideas to the farthest outposts of Europe—and he sold them out to the autocrats who lived there. A persistent oddity of intellectuals is that, when they’re talking about someone they actually know, they offer a mixed accounting of bad stuff and good stuff: he’ll drive you crazy with this, but he’s terrific in that. The moment someone becomes a feature of the past, however, he is reduced to a vector with a single transit and historical purpose. If we treated our friends the way we treat our subjects, we wouldn’t have any.

Adam Gopnik, “The Illiberal Imagination”, The New Yorker (20 March 2017), 90.