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

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.

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 aesthetic dimension of the ideal state comes out in the idea of harmony, which is the classical idea of beauty as "concinnitas" or "unity-in-variety".

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

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.