You can see something incongruous about a  stogy German professor Herbert Marcuse in Disney Land  and seeing that as late Capitalism that would lead directly into Nazism. California is the land "that hung the jerk that invented work.  I am a native Californian, and a lot of that tolerance and laid back attitude certainly affected me, but I have that sort of seriousness  and urgency of the feeling of finding the TRUTH to have made me seek and search in the great NY Litvak yeshivot. I think in high school this must have been apparent to my friends, Roland Hutchinson, Wendy Wilson. Paula (Lea) Finn and others. That was even before I was walking around with books that indicated as much. [Though I am not dismissing the insights of the Frankfurt School either. My point is there is much to e learned from these later thinkers, but one thing is lacking-faith with reason.]

But I never really came to a place where I could made sense of it all--the big picture. The best I could come up with was a lesson I learned almost at my first few days in Shar Yashuv--the importance of the Rishonim/Mediaeval thinkers. And that includes their synthesis of Faith with Reason.  

So while I have great appreciation for  later thinkers, I do not think they get anywhere near the depth of the Rishonim. 

If this is any indication of the issue let me say as an example that even in Shar Yashuv I would spend most of my in depth learning time with achronim/ later thinkers --because they are the key to unlocking the Rishonim.

Thus in Philosophy also, while the later people, Kant, Hegel, Leonard Nelson certainly are important, still there is something that we need to dig out of the Middle Ages.

[Just as  an example--Did Limited Constitutional Government, Parliament came from later people? Not at all. These all came from the English Middle Ages, Henry II, the English lords against King John, Edward I etc.

In the modern period it is the European philosophers tat get entangled with the internal world. Te Anglo American ones get the outer world, but lose the inner. The synthesis seems to be the Kant Friesian approach of Leonard Nelson that realizes there is a source of knowledge that is not reason nor sense perception. [Non intuitive immediate.]