It is well known that at one point in his life Hegel was of the opinion that the Phenomenology could be seen as an introduction to his System of philosophy. Yet even today no one knows what exactly might have led Hegel to this opinion. Since Hegel developed the Phenomenology as a “Science of the Experience of Consciousness” that runs through the various ways that subjects relate to objects, the idea does not seem prima facie misguided that Hegel wanted to justify his fundamental metaphysical assumption, his monism of reason, through a theory of types of objects and their epistemic conditions. I believe that this idea can take us a long way towards understanding the function that Hegel himself ascribed to his phenomenological introductory project. For Hegel appears to have provided both a theory of the conditions of object constitution as well as a procedure for making the conditions plausible. Even if one does not find his theory and his procedure convincing, one can still see clearly in his presentation why the question of understanding objects is philosophically meaningful. This is in my eyes a sufficient reason to investigate this question in the context of Hegel's phenomenological analysis.

I will divide the argument into four sections. The first (1) will sketch the epistemological situation to which Hegel reacted in his Phenomenology.