1. Melissa Steyn


175

EXISTENCE, COMMUNICATION, VIOLENCE AND A MAINLY
KIERKEGAARDIAN EXISTENTIAL APPROACH TO COMMUNICATION

ON HIV/AIDS 
Communitas
ISSN 1023-0556
2007 12: 175 - 187

Colin Chasi and Gideon de Wet* 

ABSTRACT
From an existential perspective, it is observed that communication is expressive of the
embodiment of the individual in the world. Communication is above all else expressive
of people's modes of existence. The dimensions of the seer and seen are acknowledged
as they relate to the embodied individual. They permit an understanding of how the
individual fails to contend with the Thou; how it is that the individual is always doomed
to live a life that has the structure of bad faith, where one hides the truth from oneself.
With reference to all of the above, it is noted that communication is violent. But in this
violent character of communication, the eternal source of art is observed. From and in
response to these observations an existential approach to HIV/Aids is enunciated in
which special attention is given to some ideas of Søren Kierkegaard. The idea is to
illustrate that people have the possibility to apply a tactful art of communication to
overcome the limiting violence of communication.

* Dr Colin Chasi lectures in the Department of Communication at the University of
Johannesburg. Professor Gideon de Wet is Chairperson of the Department of
Communication at the University of Johannesburg. 



INTRODUCTION
This article follows a mainly Kierkegaardian existential approach to communication on
HIV/Aids. In this approach communication is regarded as violent in a way that
demands tactful existential expression of the arts of communication.

It is argued that communication is expressive of the embodiment of the individual in
the world. Communication is above all else expressive of people’s modes of existence. 

The dimensions of the seer and seen are acknowledged as they relate to the embodied
individual. They permit an understanding of how the individual fails to contend with
the Thou; how it is that the individual is always doomed to live a life that has the
structure of bad faith, where one hides the truth from oneself.

The idea in the article is to illustrate that people have the possibility to apply a tactful
art of communication to overcome the limiting violence of communication.

AN EXISTENTIAL APPROACH TO COMMUNICATION
Focusing on the individual in an attempt to understand communication is justifiable
when it is given that the individual embodies possibilities and limitations. The
possibilities and limitations of the individual are identified as the basis for the
limitations and possibilities of communication when, as for Søren Kierkegaard,
communication is recognised as not merely an exercise in persuasion or manipulation,
but first and foremost, a mode of existence (Jansen & Steinberg 1991: 20; Van Schoor
1980: 33). This is also to say that communication expresses “the way in which humans
experience reality and it is an ontological concept of man’s being, ideal-typically aimed
at achieving existential meaning or well-being” (Roelofse 1980: 44). 

Communication understood as an expression of the individual’s mode of existence
cannot be understood without recognising the choice and freedom of the individual,
based on which meaning is given to the reality which is met or (as phenomenologists
say) intended. 

Existential approaches to communication can take in the notion of the “object meant”
(cf. Spiegelberg 1965: 105) which is recognised in an empty intention that “targets
something that is not there, something absent, something not present to the one who
intends” (Sokolowski 2000: 33). 

One form of “object meant” is intended in the idea of the Untruth.

[Kierkegaard has said] My own Untruth is something I can discover only by myself,
since it is only when I have discovered it that it is discovered, even if the whole
world knew it before.’ But when it is discovered, my Untruth becomes, at least in
the immediate, my Truth (Sartre 1972: 145).

For the individual, the world exists within what a phenomenological analysis can reveal
as possibilities of his or her intending. In each instance of giving meaning to the world,
a truth is established by the individual, even if that truth is an untruth. This observation

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reminds the reader of a warning to be born in mind by all existential-phenomenological
approaches, in terms of which the “one who wants to attain the truth must be willing to
make the necessary effort, and, reversely, where there no serious effort is made, there
is no question of seeking the truth but only self-seeking” (Strasser 1963: 296). This
warning does not detract, however, from the point that the truths, including Untruths,
which speak of the intending of people need to be taken seriously. For example, and
accordingly, the experiences of the people need to be taken into consideration in
developing a meaningful approach to HIV/Aids.

The intersubjective possibilities of language cannot overcome the fact that the
individual to whom a message on HIV/Aids is communicated must nevertheless still,
through an act of choice and in freedom, give that message his or her own meaning. To
the extent that one holds to an existential view of communication, the role of the
communicator who aims at stemming the HIV/Aids pandemic can at best be that of
facilitating that the choices of the embedded individual be made in a way that expresses
authentic being.

The authentic person, in Sartrean terms (see Gordon 1995: 19), recognises him or
herself as embedded being. He or she recognises the uniqueness of his or her own
perspective from a standpoint in the world. An authentic individual recognises that his
or her unique perspective can be seen from other perspectives are also in the world. 

The three dimensions of embodiment speak of the possibilities and limitations of the
individual who communicates. These dimensions are sometimes referred to as
dimensions of the seer and of the seen (see Gordon 1995: 19) in that they permit insight
into how one individual can experience or be experienced by another (cf. Heron 1970).
Given the great importance placed on visual imagery in the Western tradition of thought
and expression (see R. Poole 1997: 114; McLuhan 1994: 42), reference by Western
thinkers’ to the seer and the seen can be regarded metaphorical of how human
embodiment in the world is expressive of communication. 

The dimensions of the seer and the seen illustrate how individuals are always alienated
in and through the fact of the objectivity of the self, which must be accepted if the other
is to be recognised. “Other can exist for us in two forms: if I experience him with
evidence, I fail to know him; if I know him, if I act upon him, I only reach his being-
as-object and his probable existence in the midst of the world” (Sartre 1956: 400). In
other words, “The It is the eternal chrysalis, the Thou the eternal butterfly — except that
situations do not always follow one another in clear succession” (Buber 1987: 17-18).

The dimensions of the seer and of the seen are therefore important instruments in
gaining understanding of how the individual fails to grasp the Thou. The individual is
always doomed to live a life which has the structure of bad faith in appearance, where
one hides the truth from oneself (Sartre 1956: 89). Schutz (1971) has shown that to live
the practical life, it is necessary for the individual to somehow forsake the subjective
for the objective. Practical necessity demands that the individual hide from the self the
implications of knowing that in objectifying reality, the Thou is crushed into the It. Yet
even so, in all real living the I exists in meeting the Thou (cf. Buber 1987: 11).

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Reframing the three perspectives of embodiment in the sequential order in which they
are noted by Gordon (1995: 19), the following can be said: 

(1) The individual whose embodiment is expressed in communication, as seer, must
consider the limitations and possibilities of existing from a standpoint in the
world.

(2) The individual whose embodiment is expressed in communication, as seer, must
consider the limitations and possibilities of being seen from other standpoints in
the world. 

(3) And, the individual whose embodiment is expressed in communication, as seer,
must consider the limitations and possibilities of always being aware of being
seen by others.

The seer needs to consider the violence of objectively denying him or herself through
taking up the identity of “communicator”. Similarly, the seen must acknowledge the
violence of objectively denying him or herself by adopting the identity of “the
communicated to”. The ongoing discussion focuses on the idea of communication as
violent, with selected reference to the three dimensions of embodiment.

COMMUNICATION IS VIOLENT
Communication is violent and being human is expressed in communication.
Communication is of the embodied individual who can only exist in meeting. The
embodied individual exists in both seeing and being seen. This characterisation of
embodied being is an affirmation of the social character of human being (cf. Adler
1949). The claims of those who would make the human being a law unto him or herself,
and the claims of those who would make the human being a variable in the stream of
life events are cast aside. In this there is violence. “Regardless of the perceived justice
or injustice of the matter, regardless of the place of power in the matter, as long as
someone is losing something that he currently has and wants to keep, there is violence”
(Gordon 1996: 304-5). 

That communication is violent and that human being is expressed in communication
does not make human existence inherently fatalistic. This is because existential
conceptualisation of communication as violent is tantamount to a rejection of
approaches which hold onto the Manichaean misanthropy of a “communicator” and a
“communicated to”. This is significantly because “the other is indispensable to my own
existence, as well as my knowledge about myself” (Sartre 1985: 38). Human
experience is in the intersubjective realm of meeting which constitutes an essence to
which the individual can appeal for a universal condition of being human. Another way
of saying this is that the existence of the human individual is inherently social, it speaks
of an underlying commonness that can be described as objective but its configuration
has no conception outside of the subjective or lived experience of the individual (cf.
Sartre 1985: 38).

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The various social techniques available for communication can be discussed as
intended for manipulation (Roelofse 1983: 6). Persuasion constitutes violence to the
extent that it involves taking away the choice and freedom of the individual. The point
to be made is that to communicate, to be intersubjectively related, suggests the need to
deny the self’s and the other’s unique biographically determined situations in a way that
makes a set of common abstractions or standardisations possible (Schutz 1971: 316,
323).

In terms of the human being who is embodied as seer and seen, the violence of
communication can also be discussed with reference to the ideas of sadism and
masochism.

“Sadism is the effort to evade the sight of others” (Gordon 1995: 19). In other words,
sadism is the effort to evade recognising the other as a communicating being. To evade
being aware of the self being seen from other perspectives in the world, or to deny that
one is a perspective which is seen from other standpoints in the world, which sadism
entails, is also to deny the self as a perspective from a standpoint in the world. Gordon
(1995: 20) notes that this denial of the possibilities and limitations of others is an effort
by the sadist to claim a mastery that can only be of God. In this way the sadist is once
again in self-denial. The misanthropy of the sadist is such that the form of
communication he or she seeks is between an I and an It. The sadist is not involved in
real living to the extent that he or she is thus unable to be in relationship with the Thou.

The masochist attempts to become a “being-for-the-sight-of-Others” (Gordon 1995:
20). The masochist attempts to become the-communicated-to who does not
simultaneously communicate. This, then, is another form of self-denial. The masochist
attempts to make others gods who situationally condition him or her. This is to say that
the masochist attempts to limit his or her possibilities to what conditions supposedly
dictate. But for human beings, meaning can only be granted when the person chooses
in freedom how to situationally interpret a context and its options.

Even, and especially, in the desperate situation of HIV/Aids, where the need to
communicate about the dangers of not engaging in safe sex are apparent, the individual
who refuses to acknowledge his or her own perspective is a masochist. Again, even and
especially in this time of HIV/Aids, the one who denies the perspectives of others as
relevant is a sadist. Both exhibit forms of inauthentic, misanthropic existence.

Both sadism and masochism evidence an attack on sociality. The social becomes
possible when the individual with a perspective meets the perspective of others through
the intersubjective medium of language. Recognition of the intersubjective possibilities
and limitations of the individual is crucial for theorising about communication in a way
that takes the existential being into account. Theorising on communication becomes an
occasion to see how we can affirm or deny the self and the other. 

One does not avoid speaking about the essential because communication is violent.
Olivier (2004: 79) reflects upon how the “aporia that confronts the reader of Ulysses,
namely that a counter-signature to the text is possible as a novel event and is

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simultaneously not possible as such, faces participants in communication:
communication is and is not possible”. Ironically success is garnered to the extent that
there is failure in the effort to violently grab hold of meaning and informationally
transfer it, one to another.

In many ways, the limitations and possibilities of communication are the source of
majesty, beauty and power accorded to communication. They are for Buber (1987: 9-
10) “the eternal source of art” in that “A man (sic) is faced by a form which desires to
be made through him (sic) into a work… if he (sic) speaks the primary word out of his
(sic) being to the form which appears, then the effective power streams out, and the
work arises…” 

In the above, two main considerations have been noted. First, communication is
expressive of the embodiment of the individual in the world. It is a mode of existence
(Jansen & Steinberg 1991: 20; Van Schoor 1980: 33). Second, it has been noted that
communication is violent. In this violent character of communication, “the eternal
source of art” was observed (Buber 1987: 9-10). The next section advances a mainly
Kierkegaardian expression of the tactful art of communication on the existential
question of HIV/Aids.

ARTS OF COMMUNICATION ON THE EXISTENTIAL
QUESTION OF HIV/AIDS
One ought not to avoid speaking about HIV/Aids because communication has been
found to be violent. HIV/Aids appears to the individual. It needs to be communicated
about. Seeking ways to communicate tactfully on HIV/Aids speaks of seeking arts of
communication even as one realises one’s limitations and possibilities to communicate
about the existential questions concerned.

For much the same reasons that no lover, for example, is justified by the banality of
words to not tell the beloved that he or she is so loved, the communicator on HIV/Aids
seeks to speak without betraying the intention of setting the other free to choose in
freedom to avoid high risk HIV/Aids behaviour (cf. Smith 1998: 369.)

Kierkegaard argued that existential tact is required to communicate on existential
concerns which are essential to the human being’s existence (see Cummings 1955: 84).
HIV/Aids is an existential issue in the way it presents questions concerning life, death
and how to live. Existential tact is therefore required on the occasion of communication
concerning HIV/Aids. The inward or subjective experience of HIV/Aids is the
meaningful starting point in the search for truth as it concerns how people should live
and die in the time of HIV/Aids.

The challenge is to begin with the subjectivity of the embedded individual while at the
same time and dialectically raising the question of truth objectively (cf. Merleau-Ponty
1962: 57). This article does not delve in much depth into the ethical questions that may
emerge, but it is noted that behaviour choices of the individual are no longer morally
justifiable with reference to the material fact of one’s living conditions. One’s

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behaviour, or communication, becomes the expression of one’s radical self. The
individual is recognised as choosing a way of life. The individual’s choices are
recognised as choices for all (cf. Sartre 1985: 17). In this, the individual’s choice of a
way of life, with its ensemble of acts, speaks of a universal way in which life should be
lived. In other words, it speaks of a universal ethics. 

Tact, as the basis for establishing modes of how people should live, allows trust or
ontological security to be sustained in relationships (Giddens 1986: 75). What the
communicator on the existential can offer is a relationship within which the Thou can
be authentic.

To arrive, through choice and freedom, at a stage of freedom where one is as one
communicates; to facilitate one to become authentic, that was Kierkegaard’s goal in
communication. This goal is much the same as Rogers’ (1967: 56) goal in the
existentially conceived clinical relationship, where one may find “the essential core of
a process by which we might facilitate the production of, through our educational
system, of persons who will be adaptive and creative, able to make responsible choices,
open to the kaleidoscopic changes in their world, worthy citizens of a fantastically
expanding universe”. Such citizens would arguably have been facilitated to deal with
the choice situations presented by HIV/Aids in creative and responsible ways. 

As at all other times, in the time of HIV/Aids, authenticity requires that the individual
communicates in a manner which is not reliant on denying the consequences of one’s
actions. Wishing to communicate that which is truth and which cannot yet be
communicated, the communicator in a process of replication (as with Kierkegaard and
Socrates denying their roles as teachers) has to withdraw his/her authority and present
the communication as a puzzle (Van Schoor 1980: 34-5; Kierkegaard 1978: 32-3).
Accepting this and still being willing to invest oneself in trying to engage an other in
conversation about existential matters demands a leap of faith. The “communicator” is
forced to recognise and respect the other and that other’s radical (rooted) reality.

Because existential tact can be learnt, it can be considered an art. This relationship
between art and learning can be observed in Plato’s (1956) Meno, where Socrates was
forced to acknowledge that there is a discernible relationship between art and learning.
But it does remain, as Socrates realised, that the only real teacher of existence is
existence itself. To teach suggests to be on the side of finality and to thence have results
to communicate (Manheimer 1977: 170). The teacher cannot lead individuals to some
existential wisdom known only to the teacher, unless the teacher is God (cf. Buber
1987: 136). Socrates teaches that the role of the teacher is to facilitate that the student
can know the truth regarding his or her life, this entails demanding that the student learn
to question.

Kierkegaard developed Socrates’ meiotic method into the indirect method for
communication concerning existential matter (D. Poole 1993). In terms of this method,
the communicator in a process of replication has to withdraw and present the
communication as a puzzle (Kierkegaard 1978: 32-3). The indirect approach to

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communication is an art, as Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Climacus says, to give “a piece
of information to the effect that everything… is so to be understood that it is to be
revoked” (Kern 1970: 93). Communication thus conceptualised occurs in the irony of
non-communication.

The listener must now act upon the communication (Sjursen 1974: 164). The
communicator has served the role of midwife to enable the would-be student to take the
responsibility of reading and acting in the world. Kierkegaard describes the use of
metaphorical language in which the speaker or helper “not only conveys a meaning but
conveys speaker and recipient to a meeting or event” where truth is disclosed in a way
that “reveals the nature of the power in which the helper takes his stand… between the
I and the Thou” (Manheimer 1977: 185).

Reading the world is not complete until it is acted upon (Freire & Marcedo 1987).
Education on HIV/Aids can then be seen as a political activity that is not merely about
regurgitation of learned ABCs. Education can only be achieved when the existential
being is able to, in critical consciousness, act from the perspective of being liberated
(Freire 1973). 

By appealing to the individual, in a leap of faith, to read his or her reality and to act
authentically, the statistical incident and the psychological drives that otherwise seem
to determine the occurrence of high risk HIV/Aids behaviour lose their efficacy in the
face of the encompassing possibilities of the individual. The bio-medical model which
forecasts continued infections becomes redundant, unable to predict the individual’s
possibilities, in the face of individual freedom and choice. 

To be sure, limits remain in the face of situations such as rape that limit one’s options.
Each day, each moment of time requires that the individual choose in freedom and in a
new leap of faith. The Kierkegaardian concept of time, critically complimented by
Heidegger’s concept of Augenblick, exposes the individual as existing and
communicating or behaving in a moment unlike the Aristotelian model of time as
consisting of objective instances which come to pass (Sjursen 1974: 85-6). In the
Augenblick, the living moment of time, the individual can be seen most clearly as “open
to whatever possibilities are met in the situation”.

OBSERVATIONS WITH REFERENCE TO SARTRE ON KIERKEGAARD
Sartre (1972) has brilliantly regarded “Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal” in a way
that lends itself to fashioning a set of almost summative observations before concluding
this article. Kierkegaard encounters the problem of how to get to know Christianity. In
the instance of HIV/Aids, the problem is how to get to know HIV/Aids. To the extent
that that which is addressed is an existential matter as both questions of Christianity and
HIV/Aids are, the search for this knowledge raises the question of history: “Can History
act as the point of departure for an eternal certitude?” (cf. Sartre 1972: 142).

Kierkegaard proposed a start that is in flux, that is conditioned and is conditioning,
whose foundation approximates to what Merleau-Ponty called envelopment. We are
enveloped: being is behind us and in front of us. He-who-sees is visible, and sees

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only by virtue of his visibility. ‘My body’, said Merleau-Ponty, ‘is caught in the
fabric of the world, but the world is made from the stuff of my body’ (Sartre 1972: 154).

Addressing the aporia differently, one can say that each living moment is characterised
by a vertical intentionality that builds its own continuous identity and a transverse
intentionality that makes its objects to be given over time (Sokolowski 2000: 139).
Over time, the human being’s encounter with knowledge of the existential, such as of
HIV/Aids, entails both building its own identity and making the objects given. Starting
with the individual is starting with the possibility of possibility.

One can only know that which one meets. There is no possibility of knowing what one
does not know. Yet, in meeting that which one can know, one has the possibility to
relate to it in different ways that are expressed in the manner that one behaves to the
phenomenon one meets. For the individual who has come upon knowledge relating to
HIV/Aids this knowledge has meaning only to the extent that the individual gives it
meaning.

Human beings display, to themselves and to others, the way things are. There are no
“mere” appearances even as one recognises that this rigour-demanding approach to
human choice and freedom demands acknowledgment that being is in a manifold.
“Each manifold is different, each is proper to its identity, and the identities are different
in kind. ‘Manifold of appearance’ and ‘identity’ are analogous terms” (Sokolowski
2000: 31). The significance of starting with the human being is that it is the perspective
of the individual which preserves the intentionally encountered and uniqueness of each
manifold.

To start with the individual is to start with an affirmation of the fact that people are
makers and destroyers of worlds (cf. Christians 1997: 13). It is, for example, to start
with affirmation that people express an embodied agency according to which they can
change how life is lived in this time of HIV/Aids. If one is to hope for ameliorating the
negative consequences of HIV/Aids, one has to accept both violent and at once also
emancipatory possibilities of human beings as makers and destroyers of worlds.

Human existence is anchored to time but this situation does not have meaning except
the meaning that the individual chooses. “Kierkegaard testified to a double universality.
The revolution consisted in the fact that historical man, by his anchorage, turned this
universality into a particular situation and this common necessity into an irreducible
contingency” (Sartre 1972: 156). In this way, the individual is a maker of worlds.
People choose, for example, to live as though this is the time of HIV/Aids or they
choose not to do so.

For human beings, truth only exists subjectively, as something other than knowledge.

So subjective truth exists. It is not knowledge (savoir) but self-determination; it can
be defined neither as an extrinsic relation of knowledge (connaissance) to being; nor
as the internal imprint of the correspondence, nor as the indissoluble unity of a
system. ‘Truth’ [Kierkegaard] said, ‘is the act of freedom.’ I would not know how to

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be my own Truth even if its premises were given to me in advance: to reveal it means
to produce it or to produce myself as I am; to be for myself what I have to be.

What Kierkegaard highlighted was the fact that the opposition between non-
knowledge and knowledge is an opposition between two ontological structures
(Sartre 1972:147).

The challenge of communicating knowledge of HIV/Aids must recognise the need for
a leap of faith that violates the dominance of the object in recognising that the choice
and freedom of the self and of the other, the subjectivity of the other is the only
meaningful starting point.

In fact — and Kierkegaard was aware of this — the experience which turns back
upon itself, after the leap, comprehends itself more than it knows itself. In other
words, it sustains itself in the milieu of the presuppositions that are its foundation,
without succeeding in elucidating them. Hence a beginning that is a dogma (Sartre
1972: 155).

In the instance of HIV/Aids the arguments of this article cannot deny being birthed in
the dogma of human choice and freedom. The aim is not to suggest that the content of
knowledge (in this case of HIV/Aids) is illegitimate but to point to the impossibility for
human beings of direct knowledge of this content (cf. Sartre 1972: 144).

Faced with the need to communicate about that which cannot be communicated about,
Kierkegaard has shown that through the art of tactful use of irony, humour, myth and
non-signifying sentences indirect communication can enable the other to encounter the
intended object of the “communicator”. Continued work on the relevance of
Kierkegaard’s indirect communication for HIV/Aids communication is planned for
discussion in ongoing work (see also Chasi & De Wet 2002). For now, a brief
conclusion to the current article is presented.

CONCLUSION
It has been argued that communication is expressive of the existential being. It speaks
of the being’s embodiment in the world. But communication is violent. It is not possible
to communicate to another about existential issues as they relate to the embedded
individual.

From speaking of communication as violence, a tactful art of communication has been
identified which announces the possibility for real living, in which the I and Thou meet.
This possibility heralds the possibility for tactful communication, especially on the
existential, that facilitates the emergence of people who can take responsibility for their
actions and who can act therefore with creativity to ameliorate and to also produce
future conditions of interaction that enable growth. Giddens (1986: 64) has offered that
this tact is what is required to re-establish productive interaction. 

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This article can be read as a reminder to communication theorists and practitioners not
to forget to begin with possibilities and limitations of the individual when initiating
necessary communication programmes. In occasions such as HIV/Aids, theorising and
acting in which the existential underpinnings of communication are not recognised,
begs grave questions from the critically conscious reader.

Further studies are encouraged to critically focus on aspects of how language, meaning,
sensemaking (cf. Weick 1995), the indirect communication of Kierkegaard, etc. can be
theorised in a way that allows for communication on HIV/Aids that recognises the
individual to greater extents than has otherwise been possible.

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