Addressing Fascism: A New Politics of Experience?

Abstract

(1) Background: The rise of fascism in American and, indeed, throughout the world, prompts a question: why does fascism remain persistent in human existence? The question is one that Karl Jaspers might have asked regarding the origin and goal of history. The political description of fascism is not adequate to describe the lived experience of those drawn to it, and to assume such people to be irrational does not suffice. Rather, culture provides semiotic structure, which is phenomenologically embodied by people in a Mitwelt. (2) Results: Perhaps what is needed is not a political description of fascism but a communicological analysis that proceeds as a semiotic phenomenology of fascism as it is culturally embodied. Jaspers’ concept of evil frames fascism as colonialism turned against itself, disguised banally in such phenomena as Schadenfreude, as described by Lanigan. (3) I approach this question using a semiotic phenomenological method. (4) Conclusions: The fading colonial dominance in the form of cultural hegemony creates Laingian ontological insecurity and a desire for one’s inner fascist to identify itself in others. Addressing fascism requires new politics of experience.

1. Introduction

As a communicologist, I have typically avoided discussions about fascism, naively wishing, perhaps, that humanity would simply evolve past such problems. Thus, I approach this topic with some trepidation.

Yet, as someone who has read philosophers such as Heidegger (who infamously backed the Nazi regime), Jaspers (who did not), and Viktor Frankl (who survived a Nazi concentration camp), the reality of fascism in the past and the dread of its return have long been part of my grounding. The rise of fascism in America and, indeed, throughout the world prompts a question: why does fascism remain persistent in human existence?

This is precisely the kind of question Karl Jaspers might have asked in The Origin and Goal of History. In this work, Jaspers presents a philosophy of history consistent with his concept of communicability, the manifestation and realization of our communication in a matrix of ongoing historical becoming:

History is at one and the same time happening and consciousness of this happening, history and knowledge of history. This history is, so to speak, encompassed by abysses. If it falls back into one of these, it ceases to be history [1].

Jaspers goes on to make several points about history. First, it is bounded, divided off from reality. Second, it is a unity of the universal and the individual as a unique structure, “[…] transitionality as the fulfilment of being.” Thirdly, it consists of the ongoing answer to the ongoing question, “In what does the unity of history consist?” [1]. The abysses Jaspers speaks of are the unconscious, uncommunicative aspects of reality. They are not part of history because they do not speak, do not communicate. The origin and goal of history, for Jaspers, consists of historical consciousness living and communicating through history with the right kind of intentionality. It is perceiving and creating unities, knowing that these unities are themselves historical manifestations. Indeed, Jaspers notes in The Origin and Goal of History that these unities are valid as signs (for Jaspers, signs are indexical functions of a rhetorical trope), which become “…fallacious if the particular sign is carried over onto the whole. It remains true as an indication and a sign” (p. 287). Further, signs become symbols for Jaspers when spoken, and as such, “Notions of unity delude us, if we take them to be more than symbols. Unity as a goal is an unending task…” (p. 291).

Here, I am reminded of what is perhaps the most quoted sentence in Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning:

“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now! It seems to me that there is nothing which would stimulate a man’s sense of responsibleness more than this maxim, which invites him to imagine first that the present is past and, second, that the past may yet be changed and amended” [2] (p. 114).

How do we approach this topic in the best possible way, with Jaspers’ communicability and Frankl’s logotherapy (originally Noo therapy, for “noetic,” meaning the “spiritual” core of our Being) and its maxim in mind?

Should I be writing about fascism per se, or perhaps authoritarianism, totalitarianism, or tyranny? There are fairly standard definitions of all these terms.

• Authoritarian governance values order and control over personal freedom, and true authoritarian orders have no established protocol for the peaceful transfer of executive power.
• Autocratic governance places absolute power in the hands of one individual.
• Totalitarian governance subordinates individual life to the authority of the state.
• Tyranny is a more general term describing any government or authority that exercises power without control or limits.

Fascism, by contrast, might be considered more of an ideology. For example, fascism typically emphasizes rejection of democratic institutions in favor of a “strongman.” The strongman is not just an authoritarian but is also the self-appointed embodiment of society and the “voice” of the people. Fascist movements are often opportunistic, stoking hatred against perceived “cultural elites” and taking advantage of “cultural rebirths” based on convenient mythologies, often including racial, class, or religious supremacy. They also play on fears of replacement by and disloyalty from those from other races, classes, or religious groups. The use of violence against those with other perspectives is often encouraged. Fascist heroic warrior figures are always men who emphasize patriarchal social structures, and LGBTQ people are always on the list of oppressed social groups, because they challenge male dominance (see Umberto Eco, How to Spot a Fascist) [3]. We have all seen signs of this ideology of late.

Political descriptions of fascism are not adequate to describe the lived experience of those drawn to it, and to assume such people to be irrational does not suffice. Rather, culture provides semiotic structure, which is phenomenologically embodied by people in a Mitwelt. Perhaps what is needed is not a political description of fascism but a communicological analysis that proceeds as a semiotic phenomenology of the psychology or “inner action” of fascism as it is culturally embodied.

As an aspect of culture, fascism has a semiotic structure. The term fascism has its roots in the Latin fascis (singular) or fasces (plural), denoting a weapon carried by magisterial attendants as a symbol of punitive power in Rome around 753–509 BCE. It consisted of a bundle of wooden rods with a protruding ax blade (see Figure 1). Benito Mussolini made use of the fasces as a symbol for the Republican Fascist Party in 1915 (see Figure 2), resulting in the associated term, “fascism.”

The semiotics of this symbol are perhaps best described as a Hjelmslevian sign emblematic of fascism itself. Recall that for Hjelmslev, the sign is not simply a signifier and a signified; rather, the signifier itself is a signifier/signified, and the signified is signifier/signified in a combinatory logic. This makes both the original signifier and signified self-reflexive combinations of expression and perception. As Richard Lanigan explains:

In other words, Hjelmslev is accounting for the symbolic function that exists in language where there is both an eidetic and an empirical representation of meaning moving from a connotative semiotics, to a denotative semiotics, and finally to a metasemiotic level of “real” reference, i.e., our usual notion of the reality or world to which we refer when we predicate a meaning [4].

The axe blade is a signifier of potential, swift, and deadly violence, wrapped in the rods as signifiers of potential, slower, more methodical violence, both indexically pointing to power as the signified, making the weapon itself a sign of the power of the state. Unwieldy, top-heavy, likely to turn in your hands, the fasces add an element of capriciousness: the weapon of the state can turn upon the wielder at any moment.

2. Schadenfreude in the Home-World

In his 2022 paper, Home-World: Moral Memory and Disposition as Habits of Mind, Richard Lanigan explicates Husserl’s Home-World thematic in which subjectivity (speaking and listening) is intersubjectivity (encoding and decoding) in a shared, communal, imagined world. The Home-World is the consciousness of your personal Life-World creating a genealogical Mitwelt of lived time and an archaeological Lebenswelt of lived space.

I want to focus, as well, on Lanigan’s discussion of Schadenfreude (from the Greek ἐπῐχαιρεκᾰκῐ́ᾱ [epikhairekakíā], the German word that means taking joy in the suffering or misfortune of others. It is comparable to Aristotle’s epicaricacy, “…a mood of degree falling somewhere between envy and spite” [5] (p. 185).

Lanigan traces the phenomenon of Schadenfreude from moral view to ethic disposition, to attitude, in a sequence of Kantian first and second judgments that never quite make it to the three-stage process Kant describes as criterion for knowledge judgments.

This habit [Sitte: embodied custom] sequence of moral proof moves in stages from (1) mood [Stimmung] to (2) attitude [Haltung] to (3) a belief [Glauben]. Herein, belief is a reverence for creating the norms or mores of social preference (reasonableness) framed by an inference of cultural practice (rationality) that we claim to see in others as right, true, proper, normal comportment [Volkgeist: a belief as value judgment embodied in group behavior] (Tönnies 1908, p. 45). Concomitantly in the context of rhetorical theory applied to ethics, we have the sequence of polemical argument wherein purport (mood) leads to conduct (attitude) and then to comportment (belief)—an impulse toward action [5] (p. 163).

Thus, Schadenfreude is an unforgiving mood leading to a norm as attitude, which, Lanigan notes, can have powerfully negative effects if it spreads to a group:

Where and when this judgment spreads beyond one person to a group of people, we observe the creation of a Discourse Cult stuck in the communal modality of Imagination that is inherently voiced as a polemic [5] (p. 163).

Key to his argument is the Hewitt Model, in which “…community is a cumulate set of choice dilemmas: Stay or Leave, Conform or Rebel, Be Dependent or Independent” [5] (p. 168).

Lanigan characterizes the United States as a chiasmatic apposition of urban and rural cultures rather than a binary either/or choice between “liberal” urban and “conservative” rural cultures. Most of us resolve the ambiguity (vagary) of our terminology for land use (metropolitan/urban, micropolitan/suburban, and nonmetro-, non-core/rural) with an “either/or value system for the eidetic feeling of being-at-home” (p. 173). Thus, we have to reconcile Home-to-World dispositions and House-to-Land memories: “This is to say, Home becomes World, and it is measured by the House on the Land” [5] (p. 175).

There is also a generational component to Lanigan’s argument with regard to immigration:

In general, three biological generations (forebearers, parents, children) make a family, and measure a decade. Ten social decades make a century of culture (the “body politic”) [5] (p. 170).

This sets up an intergenerational conflict (which Lanigan describes in Schutzian terms) between grandparents as Predecessors, who share an ideology of native identity of indigenous people; parents as Associates, who share an ideology of kin identity; and children as Successors, who share an ideology of diaspora identity borne by the immigrant. This third generation is “…always the end of ‘culture’ and the beginning of ‘civilization’” (Lanigan, p. 171). To quote Lanigan again:

This is to say, the three generations are back at the start point, except that now the culture rules are ambiguous and contingent, variously being followed (assimilation), partially followed (diaspora), or ignored (resident alien). And this contingency is the moment of Schadenfreude [5] (p. 171).

The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a perfect contemporary example of The Home-World as a genealogical Mitwelt of lived time and an archaeological Lebenswelt of lived space. The Palestinians are time-binding, i.e., “we were here first.” The Israelis have a space-binding home-land mentality, i.e., “the Gaza strip is our sacred land.” These dynamics perpetuate the conflict and make reconciliation more difficult.

3. The Question of Guilt

Both in response to the worldwide rise of fascism and because he is perhaps the communicologist I have studied the most, in The Question of German Guilt, Jaspers discusses the issue of German guilt after World War II, and he was heavily criticized by some for doing so. However, Jaspers clearly thought that more communication about what happened in Germany was necessary:

The answer is that this is the only way we can save our souls from a pariah existence […] It is a spiritual-political venture along the very edge of the precipice. What will result from it we shall have to see. It is a spiritual-political venture along the edge of the precipice. We are going to be distrusted for a long time to come. […] [6] (p. 10).

Further, Jaspers notes that if post-World War II Germany is to survive, the German people must talk to each other and engage in discourse about what happened.

Lastly, I characterize ways of remaining silent to which we incline, and which constitute our great danger […] We must guard against evasion. From such a bearing there arises a mood which is discharged in private, safe abuse, a mood of heartless frigidity, rabid indignation, and facial distortion, leading to a barren self-corrosion [6] (p. 11).

If Jaspers’ discussion of post-World War II German guilt provides any wisdom, it is that we cannot defeat the ever-present threat of fascism with silence, by dehumanizing ourselves or the other, or by breaking off communication with those we feel we have reason to distrust.

Early in the text, Jaspers presents us with four concepts of guilt in a “Schema of Distinctions,” along with related “jurisdictions,” that become thematic throughout his discussion. We can see in this schema Jaspers’ methodology of research, illumination, reflection, and affirmation at work.

Type of Guilt and Description	Jurisdiction	Jaspers’ Methodology
Criminal: Acts that objectively and unequivocally violate the law.	Formal proceedings in a court of law.	Research
Political: Acts by citizens and politicians for the deeds of the state, such as allowing the National Socialist party to come to power and remain in power.	Power and will of the victor.	Illumination
Moral: Acts committed by me, for which I am morally responsible.	My conscience and communication with my friends and intimates “lovingly concerned about my soul.”	Reflection
Metaphysical: Acts of injustice observed or known about by me that I failed to risk my life unconditionally to prevent. For example, acting unconditionally to prevent injustice to those I love, but failing to do so for other citizens.	Rests with “God alone.”	Affirmation

• Martin, 2024
• Jaspers’ methodological terms situate his terms of cypher, symbol, and sign as historical moments in the process of communication. Research consists of experiencing the world through empirical observations. Illumination brings the full potential of our consciousness to the phenomena of research. Reflection means exploring the phenomena through the categories of the sciences, applying philosophical logic to the discourse surrounding the phenomena, and perceiving the phenomena in every way available using imaginative free variation. Affirmation consists in the realization of the phenomena as a cypher of Being, a floating signifier or nonce sign that is pre-linguistic but yet exists prior to utterance. This cypher status reveals the phenomenon in its existential communion with Being, resulting in what Jaspers describes as the deepening of the cypher-script.

It is perhaps helpful here to provide a short summary of Jaspers’ existential philosophy and of his theory of communication:

For Jaspers, Being consists in Encompassing. There are two modes of Encompassing: (1) Being in itself (consisting of World and Other transcendence writ large) and (2) Being that we are (“Being-for-itself”), which he tends to specify as the immanence of Self (i.e., “the Encompassing which we are”) (1955, p. 57). At the level of Being-in-itself, Encompassing is neither the object nor the subject but the unity that contains both. Jaspers also describes this level of Encompassing as a horizon within which all horizons are contained (a field-in-a field, a border that indexes a boundary). In the existential modality of Being that we are, Encompassing consists in (1) empirical existence, (2) consciousness as such, (3) spirit (mind), and (4) Existenz [7] (p. 108).

There are four modes of communication corresponding to these latter four modes of encompassing: (1) communication in empirical existence, (2) communication in consciousness as such, (3) communication in spirit (mind), and (4) communication in Existenz.

This is a good place to remind the reader of Jaspers’ semiotics. Objectivity is the phenomenological starting point, which assumes a primordial binary analogue of subjectivity and objectivity. Thus, an exploration of objectivity leads to an affirmation of subjectivity in expression and perception. For example, after the world wars, not every German was guilty of criminal, empirical guilt. However, all German citizens shared in political guilt. This political guilt is, in Jaspers’ semiotics, the sign of a “mere referral,” an indexical function of a rhetorical trope. Metaphysical guilt is guilt in a cypher-status, a nonce-sign marking the place for the presence of a sign to come—thus grounding for the other types. Moral guilt is Jaspers’ symbol, an expression of Being in communication with others. Recall that for Jaspers, the symbol is communication/speaking, or Sprache, also translated as language (die Sprache), where it is embodied as speech in a speech community. Thus, for Jaspers, truth is communicability, an unending historical expression of our struggle to become Existenz, which results in the deepening of the cypher-script [7] (p. 106).

4. Jaspers’ Concept of Evil

To understand Jaspers’ concept of evil, we must first understand the appositions of solitude and union and of manifestation and realization, which are parameters that constitute our existential communication.

In communication I am revealed to myself, along with the other. This manifestation, however, is at the same time the realization of an I as a self. To think, for instance, that it is my inborn character that comes to light in communicative manifestation would be a departure from the possibility of Existenz, for which the process of becoming manifest is one of self-creation by self-elucidation. […] If I want to be manifest, I will risk myself completely in communication, which is my only way of self-realization [8] (pp. 58–59).

Existential communication, for Jaspers, is an ongoing elucidation in which the appositions of solitude and union and manifestation and realization form a chiasm. The polarity of solitude and union is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for existential communication. If in communication I lose myself in the other, I negate or “void” myself and our communication at the same time. “Conversely,” Jaspers points out, “when I begin to isolate myself, I impoverish and empty my communication. In the extreme case of its absolute rupture, I stop being myself, having evaporated into point-like emptiness” [8] (p. 56).

Solitude is not to be confused with social isolation but is, rather, an existential condition. The existential fact of my solitude is the basis for loneliness in a very specific sense: loneliness is the “[…] sense of readiness in possible Existenz—which becomes real for Existenz only in communication” [8] (p. 56). Thus, in existential communication, loneliness as readiness becomes the impetus for me to communicate.

My communication is also a manifestation in existence (someone sees me, hears me, feels me) and a realization of an I as a self (in communication with other Existenz, I become myself, i.e., truth as communicability).

Therefore, what does Jaspers mean by “evil?” He is not talking about evil in the mythical, metaphysical sense. Jaspers has an extended discussion of evil in his book, Philosophical Faith and Revelation. There he makes a distinction between evil in nature and human evil. The beauty and harmony of nature is contrasted by nature’s cruelty: an unending dance of some species being food for other species but not completely eradicated for the […] “cruelly efficient self-preservation of a living whole” [8] (p. 204).

Of human evil, Jaspers notes, “There is evil because there is freedom. The will alone can be evil” [8] (p. 151). Human evil, for Jaspers, is not malicious. Rather, it is a possibility of the very structures of our lived experience as embodied Existenzen:

Evil takes up the cause of mutinous empirical self-existence against the possible self-being of Existenz in subjectivity and objectivity. […] evil is an affirmative absolutizing of pure existence […] one that wills nothing but existence. […] If the will of “willing to will” is free Existenz, the evil one turns back upon itself: I will not will my self-being. […] my will is its own original freedom or anti-freedom [8] (p. 151).

Jaspers further describes evil as uncommunicative and seclusive, that in this state the will “curbs its will- to-know, by breaking off communication” [8] (p. 152).

Evil in human reality can be quite subtle. For example, because truth is communicability (we are temporal beings), the moment I am self-satisfied with my accomplishments, “I lose myself as soon as I transform this truthful self-love into a spectator’s knowledge of my being” [8] (p. 153).

Jaspers’ conclusion is, therefore, that our own moral pathos functions as a “ghostly double,” a doppelganger that “runs through all free being in existence as an undistinguishable ambiguity” (p. 153), as the possibility that our existential resolution and selfhood can become a mimicry of themselves. Victory over this ghostly double is “always one of the moment” [8] (p. 153).

Let us return to the language of the chiasm of manifestation and realization and solitude and union. What Jaspers describes in seemingly metaphysical, quasi-religious language as “evil” is really pathology. It is a morbid choice to retreat into self-imposed isolation in a mimicry of the readiness for existential communication (solitude). Jaspers contends that we are aware of what we are doing, but this awareness strikes me as a mimicry of realization. Similarly, our communication in existence becomes a mimicry of manifestation. Remember, for Jaspers, what is “good” is truth as communicability. In this sense, he follows Kant’s concept of radical evil, in which the completion of moral duty is dependent on our happiness. Ordinary, human evil springs from acting from the conditionality of our happiness—I will break off communication when I am not happy.

Nothing short of loving communication can put another on the way to the change that will make him transparent to himself. As long as we fail in this sort of communication, being insufficiently transparent to ourselves and unready for the communicative venture, this source of evil will keep flowing [8] (p. 213).

Rather, Jaspers contends that doing what is morally good in this sense should be the foundation for our happiness.

5. Colonialism

There can be little question that colonialism is, from a Jaspersian perspective, evil writ large. As part of his stand-up show, the comedian Trevor Noah discusses colonization, and his commentary is quite insightful.

When you think about colonization, it is the strangest thing you can think about. Because conquering is one thing. You go to another country, you take what’s theirs. You want more, you take the land, you take the resources, you kill the people. That I understand. […] But colonization, it’s hard to understand, it’s strange, because you don’t just go there and take over, you then force the people to become you. That is such a stranger concept. When you think about where the British did it, they did it in Africa, they did it in Asia. And think about in India, those cultures could not be more diametrically opposed [9].

Compare this to an ideal approach to exploration, such as we see in a show like Star Trek. The United Federation of Planets is a democratic republic, and their cardinal rule is the Prime Directive, first presented in the original series episode, “The Return of the Archons” [10]. The Prime Directive, originally termed General Order 1, is that “Starfleet is not to interfere with the development of a culture that is living and growing, including social development of said planet” [11].

Despite the adventure-violence that permeates its stories, Star Trek’s central vision for the future is one of peaceful exploration. Colonialism is a perversion of exploration that reverses the valences of tolerance in an attempt to erase culture by replacing traditions, clothing, language, and, ultimately, people. It often involves an open disdain for the “inferior” indigenous cultures it destroys.

Regarding language, a central point that Lanigan returns to in his analysis of Home-World is Edmund Husserl’s observation that “The Home-World is fundamentally determined by language” [5] (p. 184), where language is the German term, die Sprache, and the act of speaking itself is “Sprache”. When Heidegger supported the National Socialist Party, he fell victim to the ready-made cultural polemic that “[…] speaking German is to live in the world (Lebenswelt) of exceptional people who voice the first language, sing the language or origin, embody the ‘home’ language—die Sprache, which constitutes the Home-World (Heimwelt).” [5] (p. 184). While there were German-speaking Jews, they were already considered an out-group. As in the case of the chiasmatic appositions of urban and rural cultures, we have a Self : Other :: Same : Different chiasm. For the in-group, speaking (Sprache) German (die Sprache) is a positive mood, but members of the out-group speaking German is a negative mood that results in a chiasmatic shift in the valence of disposition. Subjectivity becomes a crisis of Self versus Other, while intersubjectivity becomes a crisis of Same versus Different.

In the reverse case, when in our colonialism we take a people’s language, as America did with the indigenous Native Americans, sending their children to boarding schools and forbidding them to speak their native tongue, we are erasing their primary semiotic system for cultural memory. This amounts to the absolutizing of the existence of the conqueror: it is evil/pathology in Jaspers’ sense.

5.1. Fascism as Evil

Schadenfreude might be considered an initial sign of what Hannah Arendt termed the banality of evil, referring to the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, whom she described as “terrifyingly normal” [12] (p. 118). She found him to be a rather bland bureaucrat who organized the transportation of millions of Jews and others to the various concentration camps as part of the Nazi’s Final Solution.

Nonetheless, Fascism strikes us as palpably evil. Fascism takes colonialism further, turning colonialism against itself. Much like the fasces that can turn upon the wielder at any moment, the collective will turns against itself and assigns all agency to the strongman. Diverse social groups must become part of the structure of the state—we must all become, in a sense, “the same,” unified under the mythos of the strongman’s will. We are either a part of that will and structure, or we are no longer welcome, at best, and at worst, marked for destruction. Though Arendt was criticized for her characterization of Eichmann’s evil as “banal,” perhaps we should take it as a warning about the aesthetics of evil: fascism can present as mundane, bureaucratic activity.

5.2. The Guilt of American Colonialism

There is an undercurrent of guilt for our predecessors’ colonization of America. This guilt is different than the raw guilt in Germany right after the second world war. This is an old guilt, its origin many generations removed, but its effects are still ongoing, as are current government policies and practices. Jaspers’ categories still apply. As individuals, most Americans are not criminally guilty, though the case could be made for criminal guilt for the country as an entity. One could argue that our political guilt is negligible because the United States was “the victor.” Yet the racism towards African Americans, Chinese Americans, Native Americans, the LGBTQ community, and others remains ongoing and is again on the rise. Whether and how we vote makes us politically culpable. This political guilt remains an ongoing referral, the indexical sign of our guilt. The metaphysical guilt of colonialism is the grounding cypher-status, the nonce sign marking the place for the presence of the sign of guilt. The moral guilt of colonialism is our expression of Being in communication with others as symbol, our speaking and communication in the world.

5.3. Ontological Insecurity

To return to my original question, why does fascism persist as a problem in human communication?

For this, I turn to R.D. Laing’s concept of ontological insecurity. Recall that for Laing, the other’s behavior is an experience of mine. My behavior is an experience of the other. Thus, he studies the relation between experience and experience as inter-experience. As Lanigan notes,

The technical version of the perspectives model by R. D. Laing (1966) consists of three hierarchal levels: (1) direct perspective of knowing, (2) meta-perspective of imagining, and (3) meta-meta-perspective of thinking. These three perspectives respectively correspond to Kant’s (1) persuasion, (2) pragmatic belief, and (3) conviction [13] (p. 7). See also Laing, R. D., Phillipson, H., and Lee, A. R. (1966) [14].

Whereas the ontologically secure person encounters life’s difficulties “from a centrally firm sense of his own and other people’s reality and identity” [14] (Laing 1960, p. 39), the person suffering from ontological insecurity has lost or never developed such assured confidence and becomes preoccupied with “preserving rather than gratifying himself” [14] (p. 43). This ontological insecurity can take three forms: engulfment, implosion, and petrification. The person experiencing engulfment fears being “absorbed” by the other and therefore chooses isolation. The person experiencing implosion feels as though they are an empty “vacuum” inside, and contact with reality threatens to crush them. The person experiencing petrification fears objectification by the other such as Sartre characterizes as “the look” in Being and Nothingness. Thus, the following refers to ontological insecurity:

Therefore, the polarity is between complete isolation or complete merging of identity rather than between separateness and relatedness. The individual oscillates perpetually, between the two extremes, each equally unfeasible. He comes to live rather like those mechanical toys which have a positive tropism that impels them towards a stimulus until they reach a specific point, whereupon a built-in negative tropism directs them away until the positive tropism takes over again, this oscillation being repeated ad infinitum [15] (p. 61).

In Jaspers’ language, the individual vacillates between solitude and union, neither of which allow them to be an Existenz in existential communication. Further, this makes them alternatively lost in intrapersonal communication, therefore (1) having no basis for making objective self-judgements and (2) making them susceptible to manipulation by other individuals or groups. This manipulation is not just from the political right. One area through which both the political right and left become susceptible to manipulation is through wellness, much of which came from alternative medicine during the pandemic [16].

The authoritarian turn (and penultimate threat of fascism) in America can be characterized as a consequence of ontological insecurity based on the fear of engulfment (e.g., loss of cultural hegemony, “replacement” of white people by people of color), implosion (e.g., the vacuum of “white culture”), and petrification (such as objectification from the guilt of colonialism). This ontological insecurity is perhaps nowhere plainer than in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. There can be no doubt that this slave trade and the United States’ resistance to ending it and especially to embracing black people as full citizens reflect this ontological insecurity. It is perhaps the greatest source of American guilt and the evil of reverse colonialism. These often underlying, unmarked ontological insecurities structure our discourse with each other.

6. Conclusions

Therefore, what are our remedies? How do we address fascism?

In Jaspers’ terminology, the polarity of solitude and union are balanced by manifestation and realization. Manifestation (in empirical existence) and realization (eidetic experience of myself) bring me back from these flights into isolation and union. Isolation is replaced by loneliness as readiness for communication (remember, truth is communicability). As Jaspers notes,

Nothing short of loving communication can put another on the way to the change that will make him transparent to himself. As long as we fail in this sort of communication, being insufficiently transparent to ourselves and unready for the communicative venture, this source of evil will keep flowing [8] (p. 213).

In addition, despite Jaspers’ seemingly sharp demarcation between healthy and morbid/pathological communication, he is constantly reminding us of the many ways in which we can fall short and “slip” into morbidity. He is perhaps much closer than we might think to what Lanigan describes as Laing’s “poignant version of human communication” [17] (p. 63), which Laing describes in The Politics of Experience as the struggle of the “estranged integration we call sanity”:

Let no one suppose that we meet ‘true’ madness any more than we are truly sane. The madness we encounter in ‘patients’ is a gross travesty, a mockery, a grotesque caricature of what the natural healing of the estranged integration we call sanity might be. True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality: the emergence of the ‘inner’ archetypal mediators of divine power, and through this death a rebirth, and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer [18] (p. 119).

The death of the “false self” and connection to “the divine” is similar to Jaspers’ notion of Existenz, the existential self as a cypher, and its ongoing struggle to avoid lapsing into morbidity of mere psychological existence. Existenz (Being that we are) is the fourth existential mode of the Encompassing (Being-in-itself).

Existenz is not a utopian destination. Further, the visions of utopia from the right in the form of “the good old days” and the flights into health in which we seem to shed all morbidity are rejected by Jaspers and other philosophers such as Plessner in his Philosophical Anthropology.

Every utopia in which man believe to find a permanent home, will in time turn out to be an illusion. The human being can only stay faithful to himself, accepting the irreconcilability of possibility and reality [19] (p. 239).

In this sense, Plessner’s perspective has much in common with Jaspers’. Utopia can remain an idealized goal that we can never fully manifest, a sign (in Jaspers’ sense), a symbol in the moment of communicability when spoken of, but not a fixed destination. Existenz assumes Jakobson’s Prague Prism, where vertical paradigmatic space is a possible event with the future on top and memory on the bottom, and horizontal syntagmatic space represents diachronic time as a chain or thought, with history behind us and utopia before us. It should come as no surprise that this is reflected in the structure of language, the primary semiotic system for culture. Communicability is homologous with the structure of Jakobson’s Prague Prism.

Therefore, how do we speak to each other with regard to fascism? We can further clarify using Jakobson’s semiotic theory of communication. Recall that while the linguistic sign is the starting point for Jakobson’s phenomenological functions of discourse, he prioritizes distinctive features as the eidetic realization of both/and choice prior to empirical actualization in practice. As noted by Lanigan,

Only a code (semiotic) grounds the eidetic combination of “addresser” (speaker) and “interpreter” (thinker) as linked by empirical message (linguistic) [20] (p. 5).

Based on the referential context, an addresser seeking contact chooses a code for a message (sign) while acting as the first interpreter of what will be said. The addresser functions as the primary model for how messages may be coded. In this moment, addresser and addressee are embodied intrapersonally, in the same human being, as one who both perceives and expresses communication prior to utterance. Once an interpersonal utterance is made, information is created by the conative function of the addressee as the addressee strives to translate an empirical message (speech, or logos) back into the original eidetic code (what did the addresser mean?) by sorting out what is message and what is code.

The message as sign consists of an expressive signifier and perceptive signified, but once shared, a message is subject to the metalinguistic function of code, where one already symbolic message can stand for another. This metalinguistic function situates the comparisons of codes and messages as a rhetorical act “…in which one signifier is compared with another signifier… and one signified with the other signified…” [20] (p. 7). Jakobson’s poetic function reveals the message as a double articulation of choice of meaning (paradigmatic selection) and practice (syntagmatic combination). The message becomes a distinctive signifier/signified and a redundant signifier/signified (in other words, a Hjelmslevian sign).

Thus, when faced as an addressee with what seems to be a fascist sign (not only as speech but especially as speech), there is a complex process of judgment that takes place in which I implicitly ask, “Is the speaker being fascist?” As an addresser, it is perhaps even more important that I engage a similarly complex process of judgment, which suggests the question, “Am I being fascist?”

Recall the Frankl quote and Jaspers’ doppelganger: Frankl begins with the meta-perspective of imagining. When we apply Frankl’s principle, we are implicitly asking the question, “What if I am about to be the doppelganger?” This is the question we must always ask ourselves as we communicate with each other about whether we are to survive the ever-present possibility of the recurrence of fascism.