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

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

The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it.

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 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.

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

You only have to talk to artists to see that they work according to rules, and that they know all too well that they can employ only certain means to achieve the ends they want.