is a journalist and philosopher of technology with degrees from France’s École Normale Supérieure in Lyon and HEC-Paris, where she specialised in innovation and media, before joining Philonomist’s editorial team.
Picture: © CP
Dear reader,
Climate, sexism, biodiversity, not to forget well-being at work and mental health… If there’s one thing organisations love doing today, it’s raising awareness, namely through “sensitisation” workshops. I’ve experienced this first-hand, since I’m often asked to intervene in companies to sensitise employees to philosophical issues related to AI. The idea behind these events is simple: sharing information isn’t enough; it needs to be reiterated as often as possible, and in playful, interactive ways. Eventually, it is believed that the audience will end up changing their ways and mental habits seamlessly and without too much effort. But what does our obsession with “sensitisation” say about us? And what are its limits?
The use of the term says a lot. “Sensitisation” over “rationalisation” suggests that society has become radically empiricist – this is the theory that holds human beings to be blank slates (tabula rasa, to use John Locke’s famous term) on which impressions of the world are made. In his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), philosopher David Hume explains that even our most abstract and rational ideas are by-products of these impressions. “An impression first strikes upon the senses [...]. Of this impression there is a copy taken by the mind, which remains after the impression ceases; and this we call an idea.” The more we’re exposed to certain impressions, the more we understand the ideas associated with it.
In training workshops, it’s common to draw on videos, group exercises, and moments of interaction in order to anchor abstract ideas in affective experiences. The idea being that the public will later “reactivate” this idea by remembering the experience associated with it. But presented as such, sensitisation comes across as a vulgar form of conditioning. And when all is said and done, you can quite easily attend a climate workshop without starting to recycle your own waste.
Well understood sensitisation doesn’t claim to stick to the triggering of affective reactions. Rather, it aims to reveal to individuals new swathes of reality. Here, the technical sense of the word is revealing: in biology, sensitisation refers to a process through which a stimulus acquires the power to trigger a reaction. The most well-known example is that of photographic plates which are sensitised in a bath of acidified silver nitrate, to make them reactive to light.
‘My experience is what I agree to attend to’
—William James, philosopher
When the public attends a conference on gender violence, they’re there to prepare themselves to receive information and experiences to which they might not have been previously receptive. “Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience,” writes William James, philosopher and father of modern psychology, in his Principles of Psychology (1890). “Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to.” In short, James tells us that the empiricists were wrong: “Only those items which I notice shape my mind. Without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.”
This is where the initial promise – to change the public effortlessly – can turn out to be a lie: a sensitisation exercise, taken seriously, can be painful, disturbing. You can’t unsee it, as they say. But this is also the exercise’s limit: can a whole society change merely by being sensitised? Is that really all that is needed?
Deep down, the object of all these workshops is to allow us to find better ways of living together and reclaim control over our common future. This means agreeing on the norms which will govern society, since these norms cannot stem solely from individual epiphanies. To do this, we could seize the opportunity of these moments of sensitisation to create new spaces of democratic discussion, in the sense developed philosopher Jürgen Habermas: his idea is that members of a democracy should deliberate in order to produce norms to which each member can adhere not because they’re “sensitive” to such and such a problem, but because they understand them to be rationally just. We therefore need to do more than simply reveal reality; we need to actively try to change it. So yes, by all means, let’s sensitise – but not without deliberating too!
Apolline Guillot
Picture © Jaime Lopes / Unsplash
