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

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 was no Prussian bastion to stop the Scotsman's swift conquest of the territory once claimed by reason.

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.

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.

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

The romantics were reacting against a modern culture that divided individuals from themselves (through specialisation in the division of labor), from others (the competitive market place) and from nature, which had been reduced down to a machine through technology. The antidote to such division is unity and wholeness, which means feeling at home again in the world.