Quotes from Frederick C. Beiser

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

That Hegel is a metaphysician, and that he thinks metaphysics is fundamental to philosophy, is plain enough from his definition of philosophy.

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.

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

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

The modern principle of representation – that each individual should participate in the state – grew out of the forests of Germany and will eventually dominate the entire modern world (VD I, 533/203).

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 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.

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".