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.

Hegel remains of great importance to understand ourselves, but essentially because we have all grown out of a reaction against Hegel.

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.

The absolute as the idea is neither subjective nor objective; it is the intellectual structure under which they are subsumed.

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

The struggle against subjectivism was the attempt to avoid the charge of what was then called "idealism" or "nihilism", i.e., that we know nothing more than our own representations.

Since substance is infinite, the universe as a whole, i.e., god, Hegel is telling us that philosophy is knowledge of the infinite, of the universe as a whole, i.e, god. You cannot get more metaphysical than that. I think that Hegel scholars have to admit this basic fact rather than burying their heads in the sand and trying to pretend that Hegel is concerned with conceptual analysis, category theory, normativity or some such contemporary fad.