Another Paradox

I uncovered another paradox that I may not be able to unpack satisfactorily at this time. Let me quote from Stephen Hick's book, Explaining Postmodernism, Page 46: "We can also get a universe that does not dehumanize us. Hegel argued that the realist and objectivist models had, by separating subject and object, inevitably led to mechanical and reductionist accounts of the self. By taking the everyday objects of empirical reality as the model and explaining everything in terms of them, they necessarily had to reduce the subject to a mechanical device. But if instead we start with the subject and not the object, then our model of reality changes significantly. The subject, we know from the inside, is conscious and organic, and if the subject is a microcosm of the whole, then applying its features to the whole generates a conscious and organic model of the world. Such a model of the world is much more hospitable to traditional values than the materialist and reductionist leanings of the Enlightenment." Let me lay out and define the poles of the paradox before referring to Hick's paragraph above. Here is the ontological paradox: is the world a monism, whose reductionism states that the whole is an arrangement of its parts, reducible down to an ultimate physical substratum, which can be epistemologically studied experienced and explained through a subject-object relationship observed and defined from outside of both? Or is the world a monism of the spiritual kind, a whole that cannot but be that the emerging whole is greater than the sum of its parts? Is this whole, and its parts, holistically to be perceived, experienced, conceived of and theorized about by the human thinker as a subject permanently divorced from external reality and its objects out there? Are Kant and Hegel correct is claiming that all epistemological endeavor can only study and make sense of phenomena, for the world of noumena and its objects are forever unknowable, outside the thinker's head, so to speak? Let me reformulate this paradox more concisely: What account of what the universe is and how it operates more clearly--a holistic or reductionist explanation for ultimate reality? As an ontological and epistemological moderate, I would say that we must study the object from the vantage of the subject and detached as would a scientist. I would also take the Kantian route and insist that we must exist, experience and study objects in their phenomenal representation only, for we cannot know or explain them as they really are. Now an Objectivist, the staunch law of contradiction-stalwart support of Aristotelian consistency and logic, would find my dualistic uniting and blending of the opposing theories of holism and reductionism to be false, illogical, meaningless, erroneous nonsense. But I am trying to make sense of a complicated, contradictory world, not easy to present through a logical explanation of probable certainty, so this is the best hypothesis that I can offer. Now let me give me response to Hicks as quoted up above: Hegel pans the Enlightenment mechanical, reductionistic model of reality as the dehumanizing result of separating the subject from the object. Hegel wants to study reality and its objects from the Subjectivist framework of making the subject primary, with its latent Kantian mental categories, to reorient the self to be free of mechanical and deterministic laws, as the self mentally studies and functions in the world of spirit and ideas, within the mind of God, and the universe then is utterly mental and organic, as the whole is the aggregation and interaction of these parts. Hegel's theory of truth is coherentism and Hick's theory of truth likely is one of correspondence, more or less. My moderate solution to the paradox (My solution is my best hunch, not the final world on the matter.) existing between these rival monists models is to recommend an Objective epistemology and ontology be primary, and the Kantian ontology and epistemology be of secondary importance in application.