Hegel's Introduction to the POS

In the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel sets out his plan to go forward from the impasse and skepticism that was left by the idealism of his predecessors, Kant, Fichte and Schelling, as well as Descartes and Hume before them. Hegel makes the point that in all of the philosophising of these earlier thinkers there was an insistence on the "natural assumption" in which the first task of developing a philosophy or metaphysical system is to first embark on an inquiry into cognition, to understand first what the subject is capable of knowing about the object. In Kant as in transcendental philosophy generally, methaphysics is restored once it is demonstrated that the object conforms to the subject through universal sensibility and categories of thought. Their philsophic efforts were mostly concentrated in epistomologic projects not ontology. Kant's transcendental philosphy sets limits to human knowledge insisting that the object itself is unknowable. "The natural assumption" in the end leaves us with an unbrideable gap between consciousness and reality.
This scepticism is unaceptable to Hegel; he sets himself firmly on the path to uphold the mind's capacity to find reason in the world, to be "at home" in the world, in which there is unity of self and world. What's more, Hegel explains that the "natural assumption" characterizing prior philosophising as an investigation into cognitive capacity leads to absurdity because it unjustifiably assumes that we have the cognitive means to investigate and assess our cognitive abilities with certainty. So there would need to be an inquiry into our cognitive ability to assess cognition, and so on ad infinitum. So the "natural assumption" is really not presupositionless as suggested. For Hegel, there is no need, as for Kant, to "become acquainted with the instrument, before we undertake the work for which it is be employed". Rather, says Hegel, we should just start and see how far we get, that is, from our commonsense knowledge of reprsentations only to a consciousness of the process through which the object creates our representations.
We cannot, however, just proceed with whatever presupositions we like. This would lead to the problem of ajudicating among differing presupossitions. A phenomological examination is, initially anyway, not science "because it has only phenomenological knowledge for its object...free and moving in its own peculiar shape, yet from this standpoint it can be regarded as the path as the path of the natural consciousness which presses forward to true knowledge; or the way of the Soul which journeys through the series of its configurations as though they were stations appointed for it by its own nature, so that it may purify itself for the life of the Spirit, and achieve finally, througha completed experience of itself, the awareness of what it really is, in reality, the detailed history of the education of consciousness itself to the standpoint of science." The presuposition of a phenomenological examination being experience, an account of consciousness as it appears from the subject's standpoint in which "the object...it is true, seems to be only for consciousness in the way that consciousness knows it; it seems that consciousness cannot, as it were, get behind the object as it exists for consciousness so as to examine what the object is in itself". Since, according to Hegel, consciousness moves through a logical, that is, a dialectical progression to the light of reason of its own accord, or "shapes of consciousness", we do not need to criticize the initial presuppositions, however erroneous, since as Hegel remarks, "what consciousness examines is its own self, all that is left for us to do is look on".