 The first task mentioned amounts to answering the question: how can one convince what he calls in the Phenomenology a “natural consciousness” (natürliches Bewusstsein), i.e., an ordinary human being that is committed to the common discursive/conceptual standards of reasoning—how can one convince such a subject by discursive means (and not just by appeal to some strange non-standard procedures like intellectual intuition or revelation) of the epistemic legitimacy of the assumption of a subject-object unity/identity that is prior to and constitutive of its parts/elements? Because the answer to this epistemological question is meant to ground the metaphysical/ontological claim concerning the ultimate constitution of reality, Hegel thought fit to address it in the form of an introduction to what subsequently had to be elaborated in a systematic way as a metaphysical doctrine about what there ultimately is. This epistemological task turned out to be much more difficult than Hegel initially thought. This is documented by the surprisingly many numbers of different sketches of what he took to be an “introduction” to his system even before he published the best known version of this introduction, the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807. Actually, the Phenomenology is not just the best known, it is the only version of an introduction Hegel ever elaborated in detail, at least in print, that explicitly addressed the task at hand as an epistemological problem. In the second edition of the exposition proper of his system, the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline published much later in 1827 (first edition 1817) he chose a different introductory path to his metaphysical project under the title “Positions of Thought towards Objectivity” (Stellungen des Gedankens zur Objektivität) for reasons that have to do with a different assessment of the epistemological task. However, the Phenomenology still remains the most straightforward attempt to settle the question as to the metaphysical priority of the subject-object identity as an epistemological problem.