Abstract
In the context of the fairly recent Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRC), I examine phenomenologically the nature of truth as the essential condition for overcoming social and political conflicts, and as an instrument for enforcing so-called “transitional justice” periods and promoting reconciliation. I also briefly approach the limits of this truth’s possibility of being recognized, if its evaluative and practical dimensions and its appeal to an “intelligence of emotions” do not prevail over its merely theoretical claims. Though not expounding Schutz’s and Husserl’s contributions, and meditating on phenomena they did not deal with, I carry out this reflection inspired by their work and methodological approach. The case study used as an intuitive illustration is the recent Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
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Notes
The original version of this paper was read as the Alfred Schutz Memorial Lecture at the SPHS Plenary Session, Salt Lake City, Utah, 2005.
There are several very good works that deal with these issues. I particularly recommend the compendium edited by R.A. Mall and D. Lohmar (1993), especially the articles of Bernhard Waldenfels (“Verschränkung von Heimwelt und Fremdwelt”) and of Dieter Lohmar (“Zur Überwindung des heimweltlichen Ethos”).
See further developments on this subject in E. Gellner (1994).
By Liberalism, as we explain further on, I do not refer to the traditional North-American political “left” versus Conservatism, or “right.” I refer, in general, to the Western individualist conception of the foundations of the State, as found since Hobbes or Locke, versus the collective or communitarian foundation of the same. In Latin-America, neo-Liberalism is viewed as ultra-Liberalism, especially in the economic realm, being made responsible—maybe unjustly—for the extreme poverty of the vast majority of its population.
That this process of homologation may have a meaning more than merely imputable to a dominant civilization, and exhibit the traits proper to a new culture, leads some European philosophers to characterize globalization as the reign of mono-culture or in-culture. See, on this subject, G. Granel (1998).
This debate has been ongoing for several years. A small collective essay presenting the state of the discussion among Charles Taylor, Anthony K. Appiah, Jürgen Habermas, Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, and Susan Wolf, is presented in Amy Gutmann (Ed.). (1994).
See the developments on this subject in Jürgen Habermas (1988).
Data given by the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru’s Research Center of Applied Geography (CIGA).
These figures stem from a conservative statistical projection based on nearly 17,000 testimonies voluntarily given to the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, mostly by victim survivors, and the confrontation of different data bases with the first and last names of nearly 35,000 victims, among those murdered and those reported missing.
To know what we’re doing,” in Arendt’s terms. See J. Hart (1992), 28.
If what is experienced has the sense of ‘transcendent’ being, then it is the experiencing that constitutes this sense, and does so either by itself or in the whole motivational nexus pertaining to it and helping to make up its intentionality. If an experience is imperfect, if it makes the intrinsically existent object appear only one-sidedly, only in a distant perspective, or the like, then the experience itself, ... is that which, on being consulted, tells me so; it tells me: Here, in this consciousness, something is given as it itself; but it is more than what is actually itself grasped; there is more of the same object to be experienced. Thus the object is transcendent; and also in that, as experience further teaches me, it could have been an illusion, ... Moreover, it is again experience that says: These physical things, this world, is utterly transcendent of me, of my own being. It is an ‘Objective’ world, experienceable and experienced as the same world by others too. Actuality becomes warranted, illusion rectified, in my concourse with others—who likewise are, for me, data of actual and possible experience” (Husserl 1928/1978, p. 233).
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Lerner, R.R.P. Between conflict and reconciliation: the hard truth. Hum Stud 30, 115–130 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-007-9048-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-007-9048-7