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

Schiller is an important philosopher because he shows just how integral the idea of beauty is in normal life.

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.

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

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

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.