The years 1781 to 1793 are crucial for many reasons, but chiefly because they pose in an especially clear way the main problem of German philosophy for the next century. This is the old conflict between reason and faith which recurred during the pantheism controversy between Jacobi and Mendelssohn.

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.

Royce is the father of the thesis that German idealism is a story about the discovery and development of the Kantian transcendental ego - the I that accompanies all my representations - as an absolute cosmic supersubject who, god-like, creates the entire universe.

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

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

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.

The connection between romantic politics and aesthetics is plain in Schiller's and Novalis's concept of the aesthetic or poetic state.

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.

Schiller never wanted to replace the moral with the aesthetic but he did want the moral to be one part of the aesthetic. He rightly notes the aesthetic dimension of morality, that we use concepts like grace to characterise people who do their duty with ease and pleasure.

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.

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.

The idea of romanticising the world goes back to the idea of creating a harmonious whole where the individual will feel at one with himself, others and nature.