Schiller's "Aesthetic Education".

It is now about twenty years since the whole race of Germans began to "transcend." Should they ever wake up to this fact, they will look very odd to themselves.

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1826

It is still the question whether the philosophy of art has anything to say to the artist. [I myself] applied the metaphysic of art too directly to objects and handled it as a practical tool for which it is not quite suitable.

--Friedrich Schiller, 1798

Why does the Aesthetik of every German philosopher seem to the artist like the abomination of desolation?

--William James

It is a difficult problem to say why many of the simplest questions are the hardest to answer. Philosophy, of course, is littered with such difficult simplicities: What is truth? What is knowledge? Can virtue be taught? Is there such a thing as free will? What is the good life? Many people, including many philosophers, have dismissed such questions as illegitimate and unanswerable.