The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it.

The connection between romantic politics and aesthetics is plain in Schiller's and Novalis's concept of the aesthetic or poetic state.

The aesthetic dimension of the ideal state comes out in the idea of harmony, which is the classical idea of beauty as "concinnitas" or "unity-in-variety".

There is no comfortable middle path where we get to provide a rational justification for our basic moral, religious and common sense beliefs.

That Hegel is a metaphysician, and that he thinks metaphysics is fundamental to philosophy, is plain enough from his definition of philosophy.

When Hume insists that taste is a matter of delicacy, that it is a matter of having a sensitivity to features of an object itself, he is very close to the rationalist doctrine. Hume was really a covert objectivist (or partial one) about aesthetic pleasure because that pleasure had to be based on the sensitivity to features in the object.

Royce is the father of the thesis that German idealism is a story about the discovery and development of the Kantian transcendental ego - the "I" that accompanies all my representations - as an absolute cosmic supersubject who, god-like, creates the entire universe.