ABSTRACT
This story illustrates Karl Jaspers’ moment. Jaspers never presented his ideas in a narrative form, but he expressly criticized two forms of existentialism that did and were derivative of his thought: the libertarian existentialism of Ayn Rand and the French existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre. The hero of the story is a middle-aged homemaker torn between her wealthy sister (a doppelgänger for Atlas Shrugged’s John Galt) and flaky brother (a caricature of French existentialism). It illustrates Karl Jaspers’ moment, in which loving communication combines Kierkegaard’s moment of grace with Nietzsche’s critical secularization of transcendence. The account of the story explains how this episode illustrates Jaspers’ notion of the limit situation that opens a person to the possibilities of Existenz.
