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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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