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Existence and existentialism have become household words in philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry during the 20th century. Whereas the thought itself goes back to the beginnings of the philosophy of values at least as far as Socrates, as in his timeless saying that an unexamined life is not worth living, the term owes its emergence in the mid-19th century to the great Danish thinker on religion and depth psychology, Søren Kirkegaard (S.K). The German equivalent of existence, Dasein, has been naturalized as “dasein” in the English language. S. K.'s existentialism was followed by that of Nietzsche, and both influenced existentialist ideas of the two great 20th-century German philosophers who published their major works prior to the rise of the Third Reich: Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger.
Thepriorityofthought and the term Grenzsituation, rendered by some as limit-situation and others boundary-situation, belongs to Jaspers: it was originally described in 1919 in the chapter “Life of the mind,” in his ground-breaking Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (third edition 1925). There, Jaspers elaborates as follows: sooner or later every person reaches a point, a place and a time at which he can no longer pursue his life's goals or actions, because the world and other people put a limit, a limitation, a stoppage on his ability to achieve or go any further. Such a limit is like a boundary, or border, which the person cannot cross, and it may be due to conflicts with reality, with other people, or with values, caused by accidents and guilt, and resulting in suffering, happiness and unhappiness, optimism and pessimism, and finally by the dread of death. And I would add one more way of rendering this idea, that of a brink: the person reaches a boundary that is like the brink of a precipice, he looks into the abyss and is overtaken by despair. I do not know whether Jaspers borrowed the term from S. K., for the latter writes in his 1847 Purity of Heart: “Despair it the limit—here a