Schiller never wanted to replace the moral with the aesthetic but he did want the moral to be one part of the aesthetic. He rightly notes the aesthetic dimension of morality, that we use concepts like grace to characterise people who do their duty with ease and pleasure.

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.

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.

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 years 1781 to 1793 are crucial for many reasons, but chiefly because they pose in an especially clear way the main problem of German philosophy for the next century. This is the old conflict between reason and faith which recurred during the pantheism controversy between Jacobi and Mendelssohn.

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

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