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

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

No one nowadays talks about the absolute, not even people with firm and deep religious convictions. The whole Hegelian project has no resonance for us, as it once had for the Germans in the 1820s and the British and Americans around the 1880s.

You only have to talk to artists to see that they work according to rules, and that they know all too well that they can employ only certain means to achieve the ends they want.

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.

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.

Liberals and leftists are not wrong in describing romanticism as reactionary, because it did indeed become that after 1810. The problem is that they make that description true of the movement as a whole, as if romanticism were essentially reactionary.