e cannot simply be ignored or passed over in the philosophic tradition and further that secular philosophy in such a tradition may owe much to spirituality. "The final philosophy," as Fackenheim says, "presupposes the final religion" (1:164). And the final philosophy, presented as it must be in a rational structure, achieves the stature of significance only to the degree it transcends rationality and reaches toward an ultimate psychoemotional experience of life. On this view the mystical experience of religion is transmuted by philosophy into what could be thought of as a more generalized (and secular) joie de vivre. That is the emotional content of an experience of the ideal, a transcendence of merely temporal existence.
Hegel argues toward this transcendence by charting the development of philosophical Thought in three stages: ancient philosophy, medieval (i.e., Christian) philosophy, and modern philosophy. It is not too much to say that the thesis of ancient philosophy is poised against the antithesis of medieval philosophy, and that modern
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