To live well is to live in harmony with ourselves, others and nature, and that idea of harmony is, of course, an aesthetic one.

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

The romantics really did want to romanticise the world itself, and that meant re-creating the state, society and even nature so that it became a work of art.

The idea of romanticising the world goes back to the idea of creating a harmonious whole where the individual will feel at one with himself, others and nature.

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.

There is a sinister anachronistic interpretation of the aesthetic state as some kind of totalitarian regime that puts aesthetic over moral standards; one associates it with national-socialism. But this has nothing to do with the romantics, whose ideal of the aesthetic state has much more to do with the republican tradition.

All the spookiness comes from giving a contemporary anachronistic sense to terms whose historical meaning is lost to us.