The Alignment of One's Ontology With One's Epistemology

 Stephen Hicks, on Page 42 of this book, Explaining Postmodernism, wrote this: "After Kant: reality or reason but not both

Kant's legacy to the next generation is a principled separation of subject and object, of reason and reality. His philosophy is thus a forerunner of postmodernism's strong anti-realist and anti-reason stances."

What is Hicks writing here and what is its significance? First, he is explaining the Kantian philosophical and epistemological instrumentalities that led up to postmodernism so popular and widespread today.

No longer are epistemologists, as were Modernist investigators, optimistic that exercising their powers of reason, through armchair philosophizing, through operating or do science in the world, as thinking subjects, confident that their best efforts shall lead to certain knowledge about objects, people and events out there in the external world.

Kant's descendants, the postmodernists, promote a pessimistic epistemology concerning ever knowing the world of noumena, of ever getting outside of their own heads to know the world as it is. Their subjective, irrational relativist epistemology is accompanied by an anti-realist metaphysics.

For Modernists their rational epistemology gave them real knowledge about the world out there, so their ontology is pro-realism. 

My epistemology, as a moderate thinker, would be to maintain the subject-object divide, at least initially, studying and encountering internal and external reality through reason and felt responding, more the former than the latter, while relying on both.

My ontology would be more realist than anti-realist, but it would have elements of both brought together as kinds of epistemological and ontological moderated monism, as the best way to make sense of this puzzling world that we live in, while attempting to find meaning while sifting through all of its bewildering, often conflicting stimuli.