In this paperFootnote 1 I propose a phenomenological approach to the nature of truth, in the context of the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRC), as an essential presupposition and concomitant instrument for the enforcement of the so-called “transitional justice” periods that these commissions recommend. Thus I approach truth as the conditio sine qua non for the transition between situations of social and political conflict to those of reconciliation. I also briefly approach the limits of this truth’s possibility of being recognized, if its evaluative and practical dimensions and their appeal to an “intelligence of emotions” do not prevail over its merely theoretical claims.

I thus wish to render homage to Alfred Schutz’s “social” and “psychological” phenomenology, which also dealt with social tensions, not only from a scientific theoretical attitude searching for a more adequate understanding of social reality, but from a practical (indeed ethical and political) interest in applying this understanding, and even contriving strategies “by which the evil of social tensions” could “at least [be] diminished” (Schutz 1964, p. 262). Indeed—in spite of Schutz’s allegations concerning the supposed superiority of theoretical knowledge and cognitive interest over valuation and action (1962, p. 36)—his truly phenomenological perspective led him to approach social action as a meaningful human experience involving attitudes of recognition and interaction of individuals within and among human groups. Hence, beyond his positing of the social scientist’s attitude as that of a “disinterested observer of the social world” who shuns immediate ethical and political purposes as irrelevant to the sound foundations of the social scientist’s edifice (Embree 1999, pp. 81–84), he highlighted the subjective “insider’s” meaning first accessed by the actor, amenable to self-explication in its reflexive or reproductive temporal dimension, and only later exposed to an “outsider’s” objective meaning-interpretation that acquires its full scope in the intersubjective world (Schutz 1972, §§15, 18, passim).

This paper does not expound Schutz’s contributions to these matters, nor those of Edmund Husserl, one of his main mentors. It is more modest in its reach, yet it ventures to reflect on specific phenomena they did not deal with in their concrete historical contexts. Indeed, rather than with mere social tensions, it deals with conflict, understood as the violent aftermath of unresolved social crises, when the cognitive or social “preconditions,” “means,” and possible “agents” expected to reduce them have all failed (Embree 1999, pp. 99–101)—or were never tried out. It also addresses some of the presuppositions of conflict and reconciliation within an intercultural context. Yet it carries out this reflection mutatis mutandis under the aegis of their work and methodological approach.

Thus it does not entail a purely cognitive description but a practical and evaluative one as well, not shunning the risk of a reflective and existential involvement with the phenomena themselves. This is tantamount to a peculiar retrieval of Schutz’s “postulate of subjective interpretation” (Embree 2004, pp. 301–2) pertaining to all historical human and cultural sciences. Likewise, it does not attempt a theoretical description of these phenomena –such as in a purely eidetic description of “essential types,” patterns, “schemes of interpretation,” or “typifications”—since it mainly refers to factual, even empirical, phenomena given in a case study. Yet it addresses the latter as “intuitive illustrations,” “instantiations,” or “individuations” of “morphological types.” As such, and not as instantiations of “exact essences,” the description of these types does not comply exactly with Schutz’s postulates of “adequacy” and “logical consistency,” whereby he intends to warrant the “objective validity” of the social scientist’s or philosopher’s approach (1964, pp. 85–86; and 1962, p. 43). Rather, this account intends to be closer to Husserl’s sui generis idea of phenomenology (and the human sciences in general) as a “morphological”—neither exact nor “nomological”—science whereby the “adequacy” of its knowledge lies in infinity as an “idea in a Kantian sense” (Husserl 1913/1982, §§71–75). Finally, though most of this reflection takes place as “mundane phenomenology” within the natural attitude, or even as a sort of “constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude” (Schutz 1962, pp. 136, 208; 1972, p. 43), it isn’t entirely devoid of a “transcendental” interest—albeit within a more “static” type of phenomenology. Thus, advancing in zig zag it takes these “objectively given” phenomena as guidelines for a retrospective interrogation and description of the intentional experiences in which their “sense” and “validity” are evidently constituted.

As a case study and intuitive illustration of the phenomenon of intercultural conflict, I refer here to the recent unveiling process carried out by the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its Final Report concerning the internal armed conflict that took place in Peru between 1980 and 2000. Yet before briefly approaching the heartrending discoveries and conclusions it published, I start with an “objectively oriented” description of the likely international and national context in which this conflict took place. I do so from the more recent perspective of intercultural conflicts in a “global world.” I then briefly refer to two of the indispensable conditions of possibility for the reconciliation—even survival—of communities who suffer that sort of conflict: First, the recognition of the truth concerning the events that took place, the determination of the number and nature of the heinous crimes committed, the names and location of the victims or their remains, and the determination of responsibilities, specially that of the perpetrators—hence the need for a plausible understanding of the nature of this truth, as moral. And, secondly, the inauguration of a period of “transitional justice” whereby the penal law is enforced to punish the crimes, and reparations are given to the victims. Finally, I re-examine truth as intersubjectively constituted in evident experiences. This sort of approach is generally elusive and unpopular, both in wide philosophical circles and in phenomenological, but non-Husserlian, circles. However, it morphologically resembles the “intersubjective agreement” approved by other transcendental philosophies.

I believe that in my Peruvian case study, the necessary “intersubjective agreement” toward reconciliation could be conceived of as a sort of intercultural agreement. Within the context of extreme conflicts and the need for reconciliation, I also attempt to lay bare the reach and limits of the phenomenological conditions of the evident constitution of moral truths, which I understand to be just as multi-stratified and temporal as other evident experiences. Indeed, the evidence of these conflict-situated “moral truths”—related not only to perceptual and argumentative reasons, and to physical and statistical proofs, but also to such strong emotions as grief from the loss of loved ones, anger, and fear—is even more contingent and unstable, and certainly enjoys less intersubjective “agreement,” than truths pertaining to other formal, empirical, or cultural disciplines.

Perhaps it is unnecessary to state that this paper’s “objectively oriented” descriptions neither intend to substitute for the account of either empirical or historical investigations, nor to expound on the state of current discussions on the subject. Furthermore, they do not plan to develop Husserl’s account of the constitution of moral and evaluative acts, intersubjectivity and multiculturalism.Footnote 2 All this is of course necessary, but is beyond the limits of this presentation.

I will begin then by questioning the starting point of every Truth and Reconciliation Commission, namely conflict; and its final goal, reconciliation. I will then conclude by examining the transition between one and the other: the hard truth.

Conflict

The Likely Context of the “Global Village”

The reflections on the human phenomenon of conflict are probably as old as the forgotten age in which humanity arrived at self-consciousness. However, it is not until the twentieth century—after the two great world wars and after the phenomenon of “globalization” becomes an explicit object of academic reflection—that the planetary dimensions in which the phenomenon of conflict may be thought are finally given.

Around the two world wars—that radically transform the European and Asian maps—not only are the Eastern and Western blocks created, but also the so-called first, second, and third worlds, introducing a new North-South hemispheric division that undermines Europe’s civilized and centralized self-consciousness from within. The fall of monarchic empires and their colonialisms gives way to new African, Asiatic, and Eastern European states drowned in fratricidal wars. Finally, as the “global village” slowly emerges as the Western “planetary empire of technology,” numerous cultural communities from all over demand—sometimes in extremely violent ways and under the form of political and religious fundamentalisms—a world-politics of recognition of their respective cultural identities.

Globalization is today, indeed, a double-faced phenomenon: on the one hand, and from a naive point of view of progress, it would seem to give humanity unprecedented tools for the “definitive” solution of all conflicts. On the other hand, it is the source of new tensions and (apparently) of new and insoluble conflicts pertaining to a “global” order. Globalization is first characterized by different net systems (economic, financial, commercial, juridical, institutional, and supra- or trans-national) that establish a spatial, anonymous inter-dependence in the world today, implemented by very advanced systems and communication techniques. However, it does not automatically cause the modernization of the peoples (Kaufmann 1996, pp. 20–36). Indeed, the latter is a different phenomenon that, upon a temporal “axis,” refers to unequal processes of the historical (economic, social and political) development of the peoples in the different regions of the orb, where specific contents or cultural values come into account. Whereas modernization pays attention to the specificity of cultures, globalization extends its anonymous, invisible tentacles to the remotest corners of earth. It thus covers the identities of cultural communities with what I would call a “mantel of indifference,” while replacing their practical, dialogical, intersubjective life-worlds with the anonymity of virtual mediations of cyber-spatial and audio-visual communication. Globalization is nevertheless not entirely devoid of all cultural elements, since it promotes and exports its own Western values, such as the unity of measures and weights, time measurement, data processing systems, among others.

A report from UNESCO’s World Culture and Development Commission, “Our Creative Diversity,” recognized in 1997 the existence of 10,000 different societies, nations or cultural communities distributed in 200 States, as well as the existence of 2,000 recognized tongues, excepting dialects (Sanders 1997, pp. 45–57).Footnote 3 Globalization is not the first phenomenon that introduces some homogeneity to the diversity of cultures under the Western empire of technological civilization. The closest antecedent of cultural homogeneity—in the political domain—was the eighteenth century birth of European national states, first as absolute centralized monarchies, coincident with the emergence of capitalist economy, industrial revolution and the ascent of the bourgeoisie. Their successors, the emergent centralized (or politically distributed) national republican states, are themselves born with an ideological intentionality and a historical project, whereby they attempt to unify and homologize the life of their diverse cultural communities. Thus they impose, within clear territorial and historical frontiers, the unity of a language, and sometimes a religion, a legal and educational system, patriotic symbols, etc.

But it is only with the presence of the phenomenon of globalization that cultural communities within those national states all over the planet manifest an unedited fear of being threatened in their very essence. Whereas national states nurture and in a certain sense warrant the existence of cultural and historical multiplicities within them, globalization uses a highly ideological (political and economic) “homogeneous discourse”—that of neo-LiberalismFootnote 4—albeit alleging ignorance of its own ideological character. Indeed, by identifying the collapse of “ideology” with the collapse of the Eastern block and announcing the “end of history” and “ideologies,” neo-Liberalism ignores the historicity of its own discourse, pretending to speak from a supposedly “objective” and “scientific” “limbo” about the past and the only liable future projects. But by replacing authentically mobilizing cultural, social and political values with pure “market” values, different cultures start perceiving globalization as a threat to their survival.Footnote 5 Indeed, computer communications technology not only transcends the barriers of national states but also of cultures. The cultural references and myths through which different human communities render themselves intelligible in their historical projects appear to be no longer valid.

World processes of decolonization, the dismantling of the former East-West blocks and the slow reconfiguration of new ones—with big differences in accent—sound familiar. Multiple cultures and nations demand “politics of recognition” for their “identities” and differences.Footnote 6 The resulting hemispheric tensions reappear within most of the earth’s national states. In this context, criminal acts of ideological, political and religious fundamentalisms, on an international scale and/or within national states, start to proliferate.

With the phenomenon of globalization, the initial tension within national states between the “universality” required to establish their national identities and the “particularity” of the multiple cultures that inhabit them—demanding respect and recognition for their singular communities—becomes internationalized as a tension among countries representing the Western dominant “civilization” and those of different cultures. Such tension evolves into conflicts of unedited features and unclear outcome, such as the one currently confronting Western civilization with certain Muslim fundamentalisms. Multiple political debates at the level of international organisms as those of UNESCO, concerning the relationship between culture and development, have not succeeded in solving problems derived from these issues. No adequate strategy has yet been contrived to succeed in establishing bridges between global economic and educational development—regarding, for example, the necessary access to advanced technology and its benefits—and the fierce resistance against it from multiple cultural communities within those national states. However, it is still acknowledged that without the existence of national states embracing multiple ethnicities and cultures, the economic, social and political development of the peoples—and the further normalization of international relations—will not be achieved. Yet it is also said that the national states have to be re-conceived starting from a “politics of recognition” regarding their own marginalized cultural communities, and the practice of fair, intercultural dialogue.

Well known at the academic front is the debate between Liberals and Communitarians since approximately 1970 regarding the foundations of national states. Liberals—in this context—defend the universalistic, contractual, formal and constitutional idea of the State, whereby the ontological and moral foundations are atomic and originally unequal individuals—yet bearers of “universal” rights—who contractually delegate to an impersonal State the “just” and equal administration of the universal needs of all—albeit only in a formal, abstract and neutral way. Communitarians, on the other hand, insist in the concept of community—in opposition to that of State—as source and foundation of the cohesion required by the State itself. The community, given in a dialogical horizon of affections and solidarity ties, is not driven by the normative idea of individual rights, but rather by the idea of duties that tie their members to traditional and historical values.

Closer to the Liberal point of view are Schutz’s own 1957 “conservative” analyses of different sorts of social tensions within the United States, which emphasize both the individuals’ social interaction as the foundation of social collectivities, and the privileged position of a white, English-speaking, Protestant majority, who interpret in “their” own terms the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights to be “granted” to minorities so as to ensure the reduction of social tensions. However, when describing the conditions of “existential” groups versus voluntary groups—as determined by sex, race, place of birth, ethnicity—(1964: 250), and also when describing the notion of social or cultural heritage as historically configuring an individual’s identity and value system (their “relevance” and “typifications”) (1964, pp. 230, 246 passim), Schutz seems to be closer to the Communitarian view.

Many attempts to mediate between these extreme positions have been carried out by each group. Indeed, from the “Liberal” point of view, there is talk about a “political culture,”Footnote 7 namely, that of the mutual respect for the rights of all; and from the “Communitarian” point of view, there is talk of a State engaged in safeguarding the survival of cultural communities that, eventually, could contractually adopt some form of Liberalism.Footnote 8

The Peruvian Internal Armed Conflict

In this world-context the Peruvian armed conflict took place between 1980 and 2000. Its background was a multicultural linguistic diversity, corresponding to 72 ethnic groups that co-exist in that territory: seven in the Andean region and 65 in the Amazonian jungle, grouped in 14 different families.Footnote 9 The phenomenon of exclusion of ample rural Andean and Amazonian sectors, by the originally European Catholic minority, is so great that, in several cases, there is no legal document to register the very existence of countless individuals. Yet other, more serious, problems affect the vast multicultural population of farmers and even hunters and gatherers in the Andean and Amazonian regions. These concern the most fundamental human rights (from a moral and social point of view), as the right to life, and to a humanely dignified life. As examples, may it suffice to mention Peru’s child mortality rate—one of the highest in Latin America despite its relative macro-economic recovery since the last decade of the twentieth century: from one thousand born live, 58.3 children die before their first birthday. The rate of the department of Huancavelica alone is that of 106.6 per thousand, a similar figure as that of Burundi and Ghana. There is also chronic malnutrition (48% of children) and illiteracy (today, among other figures, 29% of Peruvian teenagers between 13 and 17 years old are school drop-outs, and those that continue have the next-to-last school performance on the American continent, only above Haiti).

In this context of exclusion and marginalization, the movements inspired by Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth emerged during the nineteen-sixties. After World War II, Fanon echoed the European “bad conscience” regarding the colonized world’s feelings, arguing that the most important weapon used by colonizers was the imposition of their own image upon the colonized and subjected peoples. Thus the latter should first “purge” themselves of these representations and later apply a violence that should “equal” the original violence of foreign imposition. During the final two decades of the twentieth century, the result of this explosion in Peru branded the Peruvian State and society with horror and dishonor.

After two years of investigation, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded its Final Report in 2003 with an appalling statement: that “the most probable number of fatal victims ... surpasses 69,000 Peruvian men and women dead or disappeared, in the hands of subversive organizations or by State agents,” 75% of them Quechua-speaking and 90% peasants, a sector “historically ignored by the State and the urban society, ... who do enjoy the benefits of the political community” (2003, p. 1).Footnote 10 In spite of the detailed and sustained report, as well as of advanced techniques used for the statistical calculation of the losses, many interested sectors of the population—including subversive and State agents, the political parties, party-controlled media and groups that remain culturally and economically distanced from the peasant Quechua population—have denied all validity to the report, perpetuating that which the report denounced, namely “a double scandal: that of massive assassination, disappearance and torture, and indolence, ineptitude and indifference of those who could have prevented this human catastrophe and did not.” (2003, p. 1) Although there is no basis to sustain that it consisted of a racial conflict, it could not have been possible without the complicity of a “deep contempt towards the country’s most dispossessed population,” both by the militant members of the Peruvian Communist Party, Shining Path (PCP-SL), and by the State agents; a contempt interwoven in the daily Peruvian social texture.

The armed conflict itself has practically ended in Peru, but the conflict is still latent as long as the conditions for justice and reconciliation, namely, for an intercultural reconciliation, are not given. The Peruvian society needs to come to terms with itself, and so do the multiple ethnic and cultural groups among themselves. The first of these conditions is the fight against oblivion, that is, the retrieval of the truth of the events and their causes, against the “official truth” built during two decades.

Before examining the possibilities and limits of the intersubjective constitution of the evidence of these moral truths, let us now pause to consider the subject of reconciliation.

Reconciliation

The reflection that follows concerning “reconciliation” is less “objectively oriented” than the previous one that described the conflict and its conditions. Instead, it takes a step towards the retrospective interrogation of the experiences in which it is constituted. To the case of the internal armed conflict that afflicted Peru the last two decades of the twentieth century, I now add a second factual “guideline” for my retrospective interrogation: a hypothetical three-termed equation (even “syllogism”), whence two of the terms spring out of the title Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Indeed, this equation is not constrained to a merely abstract or logical dimension. Rather, it belongs to a larger, phenomenologically describable, context of experience. Thus, “reconciliation” is the conclusion of an equation, whereby the major term (or premise) is truth and the (tacit) middle term is justice. I am not merely referring here to an argumentative chain, for as Husserl remarks in his Cartesian Meditations (1931/1960, p. 10), although it may be ascertained that a judgment founds the validity of another judgment, and so on and so forth, the ultimate validity upon which any argumentative chain rests must originate in an evident experience. The equation as a whole, thus, leads us to an experiential context, understood as a process; that is, a temporal—namely, historical—human flux.

Let us first take an “objectively oriented” look at the Peruvian historical process upon which I believe the equation “truth-justice-reconciliation” must be founded. Two elements may be initially detached: (a) a complex multi-stratified social body, and (b) a conflict. On the one hand, the complex social body is the Peruvian society, composed of multiple and conflicting elements –ethnic, linguistic, historical, and cultural. It was originally constituted in a “foundational act” historically datable in 1821, whereby, in its Constitution, it acknowledges itself as a Republican State, invents its “national identity” and imposes the use of an “official” language, traditions, religion, and customs. The “law of laws” itself is only the abstract and formal result of an agreement among the parts and components of the body social. The Constitution equally establishes conditions for “harmonic and just relations” among its components (albeit abstractly and formally). Yet these conditions only agree with the unilateral perspective of a hegemonic component of the social body, namely, of the dominant ethnic and linguistic group that has long controlled the public institutions and government. The resulting confusion between the “government” and the “state” as such benefits the dominant group. On the other hand, the conflict itself resides potentially in the social body since its foundation as a State, and is intermittently manifest in different forms during its historical process. Indeed, the conflict is de facto mostly generated by continuous violations of the rights of certain citizens and of their citizenship itself, stipulated expressis verbis in the Constitution. The latent conflict is thus the de facto exclusion, marginalization, and discrimination of multiple rural cultures, essentially the Quechua and Amazonian cultures and languages, by a minority of European white descendants. Nonetheless, during its Republican history, the social body keeps reformulating its Constitution, attempting to formally rebuild “in writing” the rights continually breached in the praxis of social relations themselves. This veiled—or “structural”—violence may be translated into the moral damage perpetrated upon entire communities, whereby the responsibility belongs to that component of the social body that continuously holds the governmental offices. This latent process finally turns into manifest violence—between 1980 and 2000—brutally engaging all parts of the social body and revealing the inconsistency between the abstract and formal just and harmonic constitutional framework of its social relations, on the one side, and the concrete and material unjust and tense conditions of their effective social relations, on the other.

These premises, extracted from Peruvian historical experiences, constitute the background of the equation “truth—justice—reconciliation.” Truth leads to reconciliation by the mediation of justice. But the historical truth of these moral events and their causes—whereby the possibilities and limits are found in its evident constitution in moral experiences—may only be provisionally understood as the unveiling of the multilateral perspectives of the social body, and not of the unilateral perspective of one of its components (which would only perpetuate conflict).

Justice is the middle term of the equation, of which the conclusion is reconciliation. “Transitional justice” is known as the State’s public and institutional recognition of its responsibility regarding the damage done. It is essentially related to the first premise of my equation—the unveiling of truth—since it is by means of its recognition of the perpetrated damage that the country assumes the charge of the diverse material and institutional reparations to surviving victims and their families. Transitional justice is also essentially related to the conclusion of the equation, namely, reconciliation, and at the same time it is its partial, political realization, since through justice the State (and its Constitution) comes to terms with society.

Finally, reconciliation should appear as the conclusion of the equation that has truth as premise and justice as middle term. Reconciliation is also an experience that, described phenomenologically, exhibits a temporal structure. As such, it is a process. Thus the tripartite equation itself must also be understood as a process. Reconciliation is frequently understood as the renewed foundation of the “social” agreement, at different levels: (a) a political level—between the State, its institutions and society, or among the political parties, the State and society; (b) a properly social level—between the public domain and institutions of civil society; and, (c) an interpersonal level—among all members of the social body, especially those engaged in armed conflict. Public and private education, and the media, should also be able to reflect this agreement. But the phenomenological condition of the constitution of this agreement is temporality, in the sense of a process that in principle is never ending and must always be renewed while the social body lasts. Hence the proper horizon of reconciliation is not found in the past, but rather in its openness to the present and in its future orientation. Reconciliation is thus constituted as the ever-renewed telos of a social, historical, and ethical praxis.

Yet, as Hannah Arendt noted when analyzing the phenomena of banal evil and violence, reconciliation ought to be distinguished from the morphologically different experience of forgiveness, and its concomitant experiences of guilt and repentance, while granting the possibility—even the necessity—of their nurturing and consolidating the interpersonal dimensions of reconciliation (1958, pp. 188–92, 236–47). Forgiveness and repentance are essentially personal, asymmetric, and individual acts, oriented towards the past. While repentance “lifts the weight” felt by the perpetrators’ remorse and guilt, the gratuitous act of forgiveness liberates victims of the moral affliction of irreversible damage, leading to the self-recognition of their moral pre-eminence or dignity.

The Hard Truth

The Peruvian case tangibly illustrates why reconciliation needs the mediation of justice, and why the latter is not comprehensible without the unveiling of truth. “Objectively oriented” points of view do not awaken major controversies. As a parenthesis, it could be added that even the daily and common, positive concepts of truth and evidence, despite their implicit absolutism, do not awaken major controversies among ordinary citizens. Many are unaware that every “absolute” point of view implicitly posits “multiple absolutisms”—multiple absolute and irreducible accounts—all intolerant among themselves, the result of which is a generalized relativism. Yet, phenomenological descriptions of truth from the viewpoint of evidence often trigger controversies and reproaches of relativism. The notion of evidence itself, distorted by centuries of semantic sedimentations, is also frequently rejected as trivial or too “subjective.” Yet I do consider it both as a useful and indispensable notion for the phenomenological description of the constitution of truth, albeit not for a hermeneutical-textual, metaphysical, or sociological account. A phenomenological clarification of evidence could actually warrant a more acceptable understanding of the notion of the historical and moral truths in the aftermath of internal armed conflicts, such as the ones that afflicted Peru and other countries.

To put it in more current terms than the Husserlian ones, the constitution of evidence and truth may be understood as a sort of “inter-cultural agreement,” without the argumentative and contractual connotations that the word “agreement” usually conveys. However, the conditions of possibility of this sui generis “agreement” also exhibit their limits. Let us see how.

My presentation has not yet been properly transcendental; yet my path—rightly understood—is a preliminary step towards it. Let us recall that the deepest sense of a transcendental retrospective interrogation is an invitation to “know what we are doing,” “Footnote 11 namely, a call to authenticity, a renunciation of already-constituted objectivities and certainties, a difficult commitment to the ethical ideal of absolute self-responsibility. Transcendental reduction itself, in Donn Welton’s terms, breaks the “objectivist fetishism of the world to gain its presence and open its meaning” (1977, pp. 54–5), revealing as its anonymous background the transcendental theoretical, practical, and evaluative life of the subject.

Having said this, let me point out that the concepts of truth and evidence, in the context of conflicts, concern phenomena of a peculiar sort: that of human, voluntary, and free experiences, known as praxis, action, or interaction. Their meaning differs from the relatively universal and necessary truths pertaining to empirical-deductive sciences and from formal sciences’ apodictic truths. They also differ from truths concerning human phenomena of the “domain of necessity,” such as those relative to physical survival or to the technical and cultural production of a human world. Now, all factual truths are contingent. A fortiori, more fragile still are practical or moral truths, since they refer to political and ethical phenomena (or so-called “moral facts”). They are fragile not only because they are essentially free, or because they relate to “facts” that could (even should) have been otherwise; but also because these “facts” address strong existential emotions such as grief for the loss of loved ones, anger, or fear.

The phenomenological notion of truth is additionally sustained on a broad notion of human reason as cognitive and simultaneously practical and axiological. And beside the subjective spheres of knowledge, feeling and will, it also includes the objective spheres of their correlates (meaning-units and validities, practical norms, ethical, juridical, and esthetical values, etc.). Thus according to phenomenological description, any truth whatever is never only an epistemological notion. A fortiori, practical truths, sustained in ethical values, affect the emotions and motivate the will (by definition, free), in order to persuade the understanding.

Consequently, experiences—and their respective truths—differ according to their type of objectivity. The constitution of mathematical or logical objects bears a higher degree of certainty and objectivity—a lesser possibility of diverse perspectives—than the constitution of natural, physical or psychical, and cultural phenomena. Thus Leibniz and Hume independently called the former, truths of reason, and the latter, truths of matters-of-fact, characterizing the former as a priori, and the latter a posteriori (in the sense that their denial does not incur contradiction). The apodictic certainty of factual truths—a practical impossibility—has only the value of a desirable ideal or goal, a measure of our relative distance, or of our degree of certainty.

Truth not only depends on the type of object being experienced, but also on the quality of the experience itself. Phenomenological description is the narration of a phenomenon as the objective correlate of a corresponding experience—perceptive, evaluative, or voluntary. This frequently overseen factor is the key to Husserl’s conception. “Footnote 12 Truth itself is constituted in certain types of experiences that he names evident—namely, both apodictic and inadequate evidences. Apodictic evidences, which should not be confused with the so-called adequate evidences, are those that the scientist hypothetically predicates of his or her axioms. Inadequate evidences are all “transcendent” evidences; this is the case of moral evidences. Adequate evidences probably only “lie in infinity,” if they are ever given (Husserl 1931/1960, p. 15). As I formerly pointed out, truths themselves—expressed in propositions and established in language—may depend on the validity of other propositions and judgments, yet their final validity must originate in evident intuitive experiences—both cognitive and evaluative—that constitute those valid judgments themselves.

Undoubtedly evidence is derived from a “seeing” something as something and, in this case, from what I would call—after Martha Nussbaum—intelligent emotional apprehension or intuition, namely, “the general ability to see X as Y, where Y involves a notion of salience or importance for the creature’s own well-being.” (2001, p. 5). This natural ability to identify emotions in “intuitive judgments” leads Nussbaum to assert that “people are more reliable when they are grouping instances than when they are trying to give them a theoretical explanation.” (2001, p. 10). But this “seeing-feeling” is never an intuition of isolated and punctual elements—as Empiricists and most Modern philosophers used to believe. It is rather a seeing something as something, precisely an interpretive seeing (although only implicit, at first) that necessarily consists of a synthetic continuum (or “horizon”) of experiences. Evident experiences, whereby a first narrow sense of truth—here, moral truth—is constituted, are intuitive, cognitive, and emotional, insightful experiences. Multiple experiences of this type have been registered by the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and they can illustrate a series of past occurrences or events—in their how, when, why, who, and their values of moral correctness. Perception is an “originally giving” cognitive experience, as Husserl used to say; a privileged one, such as that of first hand-witnesses. Memory or recollection is another privileged intuitive experience, and, when related to perception, also carries with it a “thetical” character, namely, a “positing of existence.” Intellectual insights of “morphological types”—be they cognitive or evaluative—such as the essential apprehension of the difference between color and sound, good and evil, or of exact essences such as geometric ones, are also evident experiences, of high rank, known to us as “eidetic intuitions.” Other evident experiences are the insightful understanding of categorial articulations, or state-of-affairs, namely, “categorial intuitions.” Thus, intuitive experiences are not only cognitions, but also feelings and primitive voluntary acts, collaborating in the constitution of evidence and truth, for they also intervene in the interpretation of phenomena as events axiologically determined one way or another.

However, evident experiences also exhibit another unavoidable human dimension, namely, that of temporality, whereby Husserl fundamentally understands his concept of horizon. Consequently, the first property of every evident experience is to “give” an object, and the second property, is to do so in synthetic coincidence with other giving-experiences upon a temporal axis. Thus, a narration of phenomena given to a particular subject through diverse synthetically coincident experiences, consistently in time, will be considered “true.” When the experiences that constitute a true narration are evident experiences of various subjects in “syntheses of coincidence” with each other, and oriented to the same phenomena, we are facing a “stronger” sense of “truth.” The mere consistency of experiences pertaining to a single individual, or to a reduced group of these, does not suffice for the constitution of the so-called “objective truth” of sciences. Neither do they suffice, by extension, for the constitution of “moral truths” such as those pertaining to crimes in conflict situations that must be rescued from oblivion. Isolated experiences are unilateral; tied to perspectives, points of view and particular focuses. But their relativity may be progressively overcome by postulating, as the ideal subjective correlate of the “limit-concept” of “objective truth,” the limit-concept of a “coincident synthesis of experiences consistent in the course of time” belonging to “all possible subjects in general.” Notwithstanding the fact that I am dealing here with ideal “limit-concepts,” they are in fact very useful in the understanding of both the extent and limits of evidence and truth. The complexity of these concepts is frequently overlooked.

Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission elaborated its Final Report based on the testimonies of approximately 17,000 witnesses, from different times and places, in synthesis of coincidence with that of former testimonies of actors and witnesses, registered in previously established data bases. A wide selection of these testimonies was also re-enacted in public audiences all over the country, to soften hearts, open minds, and motivate wills to recognize truth, and to accept justice and reconciliation. These testimonies are also consistently coincident—in the course of time—with other types of experiences, perspectives and focuses, including those of data corroborated by empirical-deductive and formal techniques and sciences. The Report itself retrieved these experiences, conceptually articulated them and fixed them in language, in a coherent and consistent narration. By means of these procedures it established, with a fair degree of reliability, the responsibility of the selective and collective crimes against defenseless individuals and communities, ascribable to various different political, military, subversive, and social organizations. It thus rightfully demands being accepted as an evident account of an intersubjectively acceptable truth, that is, of an “objective” one. Now,—in this extremely wide but pregnant sense—“objective truth” is not equivalent to exact, mathematical, truth, but is rather the name of the correlate of an evident narration constituted by intersubjectively shared experiences. A “truth” can be “objective” although de facto it may only have an approximate value, with the open possibility of being later reconfirmed or even contradicted by further syntheses of experiences. Every “truth” or “objective validity” is thus unavoidably sustained upon the temporal factor. Hence, absolute “objectivity” and “truth” are merely a telos or ideal goal to which human experiences and language approximate, always affected by an inherent relativism and finitude.

Final Remarks

I proposed that Husserl’s phenomenon of evidence, in which the so-called moral “objective” truth is constituted, is not that distant from the notion of an “intercultural agreement.” However, the current philosophical notion of “agreement” is basically “discursive” and “contractual,” whereas Husserl’s synthesis of coincidence is originally constituted in temporal fluxes of intuitive experiences that may be retrieved ex post in linguistic propositions and arguments. It does not essentially nor originally consist of a convergence of arguments or “linguistically formulable propositions.” (Nussbaum 2001, p. 5). Thus, disregarding the fact that the term “agreement” is mostly understood as “discursive”, I believe I may preserve this expression for Husserl’s intuitive notion of evidence, since the former is nowadays an expression that provokes less resistance than the latter.

Nevertheless, in processes of “transitional justice” such as the Peruvian one, acquiescence to an intersubjective and temporally constituted “historical truth,” likely to be shared by different human communities oriented toward an intercultural reconciliation, still confronts dismaying resistance. The 47 trials currently being held against military personnel involved in crimes against humanity have triggered the negative reaction of military, political, and media groups against the legitimacy of the Commission’s Final Report. The limits of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission are not only those that pertain to all practical affairs, whereby “common sense,” and not the specialist’s knowledge, “is the better judge”—as Aristotle’s saying goes. Its limits also concern difficulties deeply rooted in Peruvian society: a difficulty of emotional order, an incapacity that affects essential human emotions, such as compassion for the suffering of other human beings, or indignation regarding injustices and extreme cruelty; and, a difficulty of ethical order, concerning the disposition to “good will” and the free self-responsible commitment to human solidarity.

As a phenomenologist, I am not merely theoretically and disinterestedly engaged in laying open the evident experience of these moral truths, but emotionally and willingly engaged in their recognition. As such, I understand that the human difficulties regarding the acceptance of moral truths and responsibilities involve not only the open-ended character of their evidence. They further involve the need to highlight the emotional dimension of the constitution of moral truths. For, as Nussbaum also contends, we still have to learn what role these tumultuous experiences play in our thinking about the good and the just. (2001, p. 3).