DE Weekly: Husserl, Aristotle, & Pyrrhonism
Below is an archived email originally sent on May 25, 2026.
Husserl, Aristotle, & Pyrrhonism
Would you believe me if I told you the ideas that led to the development of Existentialism appeared as early as the fourth century BC? The ideas I mean are those of suspension of judgment toward what we perceive, skepticism about the order of things, and the desire to adopt a tranquil disposition in relation to the world and the human condition.
Traditionally, philosophical ideas that we would call “existential” in nature are traced back to Søren Kierkegaard, the eighteenth-century Danish philosopher and theologian who approached the ideas through a Christian lens.
After him came Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the rest of the French existentialists.
But long before any of these people, there was a man named Pyrrho of Elis, a Greek skeptic who founded a school of thought called Pyrrhonism.
Pyrrhonism advocates above all for a concept called epoché, a suspension of judgment toward all potential beliefs and understandings of things and of the world, with the goal of arriving at a level of emotional freedom called ataraxia.
Pyrrho argued that it is ultimately impossible to attain any definitive knowledge about the nature of reality; instead of asserting claims, we should suspend any judgment on matters that are not immediately evident to us.
Such an approach to nature would, Pyrrhonism supposes, help resolve some anxiety about what is true, ushering us into an “untroubled” state of mind in which we feel mental tranquility.
Contrary to full-blown “Skepticism,” i.e., the idea that nothing at all can be known for sure, Pyrrhonism suggested not that truth does not exist at all, but that it’s difficult to understand, and so we should refuse to assert definite claims about things.
This was a contrarian view against the prevailing philosophy of the time, and the philosophy that ultimately emerged from the era to influence the whole of philosophy to follow, namely, Aristotelian metaphysics. (I will loop in our friend Aristotle a little later in this newsletter).
At this point, you might already see the similarities between Pyrrho’s epoché and existentialist views of nature. But how do the two connect? Where is the bridge between them, exactly?
Despite nearly 2200 years between them, the sturdiest bridge that connects Pyrrho with Existentialism is Edmund Husserl.
Husserl adopted the term epoché in his 1906 book The Idea of Phenomenology (Ideas I), illustrating an idea of phenomenology he called “phenomenological epoché,” or phenomenological reduction.
Husserl’s reduction included “bracketing” one’s perceptions of reality, suspending judgment of an event or a thing, and shooing away our understanding of the existence of the external world as it appears to us in favor of examining phenomena “as they are originally given to our consciousness.”
The goal of employing epoché in his phenomenology was not an attempt by Husserl to confuse his readers (let’s admit it, it’s easy to get confused with such ideas). His aim was to bring to philosophy a scientific foundation on which absolute findings could be built.
By suspending assumptions and prejudices about the nature of existence, he believed, we could open our consciousness to complete clarity.
We do this by “bracketing” our experiences, removing any preconceptions, and focusing on the phenomenon itself––we are not denying that the world or anything in it exists, we are simply discarding assumptions and analyzing the experiences with a fine-tooth comb.
One of the philosophers Husserl influenced most was Sartre, who took many of his ideas and ran with them. I’m simplifying for the sake of brevity here, but Husserl’s ideas can largely be credited with Sartre’s belief that “existence precedes essence.”
Ah, there is the golden thread linking the fourth century BC with the twentieth century AD.
The existentialist idea that “existence precedes essence” is a complete inversion of the metaphysics of Aristotle, which held it to be the other way around: essence precedes existence.
Aristotle’s ideas were rooted in empiricism, relying on logic, deductive reasoning, science, and other generally understood frameworks which gave him a bedrock to philosophize from.
He trusted ultimately in human senses and observation, going so far as to justify our own existence with logic such as the famous example, “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal.”
Further, Aristotle believed that we could, in fact, fully understand anything––any phenomenon at all––by examining the “four causes” of that thing: its material cause, its formal cause, its efficient cause, and its final cause.
In other words, if you want to understand the nature of, say, a human being, ask yourself the following: What is it made of? What is its essence? What brought it into existence? And last, what is its purpose?
For Aristotle, there was no denying that we don’t exist, nor that other things we see, perceive, and experience don’t exist, either.
If something is composed of matter and has a form, such as a table or a chair, and we can sit on that chair and eat from the table so that we can fill our bellies, well, that table and chair exist and that is what they are for.
An object’s essence, or its “whatness,” is what gives it its unique properties that constitute its essence.
Important to take from this, then, is that (in a way), essence does not necessarily even precede existence for Aristotle: essence is existence, and existence is essence.
All of this roundabout of contradicting ideas to arrive at what point? None in particular.
My goal today was to illustrate how ideas that contradict what we think we know about the world have always existed in philosophy. Pyrrhonism is one such school of thought that does so, as is Existentialism in our own time! These ideas give way to new ones that give way to newer ones still, and we circle back again to those who came before us…
“I seek not to instruct but only to lead, to point out and describe what I see. I claim no other right than that of speaking according to my best lights, principally before myself but in the same manner also before others, as one who has lived in all its seriousness the fate of a philosophical existence.” –– Edmund Husserl
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
I hope today’s newsletter resonated with those of you who read all types of philosophy. It’s a fun feeling to read something new and think, “Hey, I’ve seen that idea before!” Makes you appreciate humanity.
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