Eighth Variation
Is humanism the restless search for sense or “carpe diem”? Humanistic management must find a road that valorizes both of these hypotheses, through a route based on the self-expression of what is most authentically human within individuals and the corporation.

Competitive challenges within the workplace, the battle of the sexes in family life and between couples, the difficulties of the generation gap and the parent-child relationship all cause, with different nuances and expressions, a widespread need for recognition. The individual yearns for the recognition of his/her work, feelings and existence. When this does not happen, the consequences can be dangerous for mental equilibrium and personal identity can enter in crisis: “recognition is not a marginal claim […] on the contrary, it appears decisive in the dynamics of subjective mobilization of intelligence and personality at work”.

Various “humanistically” oriented paths can be followed in pursuing the search for this equilibrium. One is that which does not thematize the cancellation of grief in private life and at work. To grieve is part of being human and engages thought. Only grief permits that inner reflection, that capacity to filter the re-emergence of the more pronounced defensive systems to one’s conscience, thus reaching the mind. It is a question of ascribing “a sense to grief” through recognition: in cases where efforts are recognized, then everything acquires a meaning and one perceives that the hardships have contributed to the construction of individual identities.

Behind the choice of this route is the idea that Humanism [...] became truer precisely when it was able to achieve the potential of explaining its invisible part: when beyond the ethereal skies of iconic factions, of edifying literature, of consoling philosophies, it could proclaim all the discontent, all the anxiety and all the intellectual instability that for centuries, in latency and circumspection, they had fed.

It is in the figures of tragedy, insufficiency and incompleteness that one finds the authenticity of a vocation for thought that has always interrogated more on the affliction of living (on having to leave life, on ineluctable impotence, on offended reason, on sensing the threshold of nothingness …) than on the pleasure and enjoyment for its own sake. The tragical nature of the human condition represents the subject and the motive for stimulating research precisely because it is destined to incompleteness. It is the first and last question of awareness. Therefore, when we forget to attend to this awareness, Humanism just withdraws and becomes an expedient of survival. For a survival that is certainly more cheerful and soothing, but which has lost contact with the intrinsic enigmatic nature of living.

In conclusion, according to this line of interpretation, the essence of Humanism, more than in the pleasant torpors of 15th/16th century painting, is found in Caravaggio-like torsions, in baroque music and in that merciless repainting of his face in decay, in Rembrandt.

However, there are alternatives for which it is possible to reinstate the humanistic patrimony of thought in this new context of contemporaneity, marked, as never before, by the fusion between material and immaterial. It takes its moves precisely from the consideration that the processes of recognition with non-physiological needs, of second order, linked to them and within them, are all referable to the immaterial dimension. We inhabit a world in which we wish to live material experiences (visual, auditive, kinesthetic) to make immediate contact with an emotive, spiritual, transcendent dimension. I want to savour a coffee in a bar where jazz is playing to be able to live an experience that brings me into contact with another me, with the spiritual nature I feel inside.

Identification with the group, with the brand, is no longer enough. What counts is to get experience, moment by moment, here and there. Needs therefore regard spirituality and identity at the same time. The freedom of choosing, moment by moment, how to be, how to change and to change oneself; savouring the moment can represent the ideal of reference. In this sense, we are beyond Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. New motivations, existential and professional, spring forth from these new needs. People look for a marvellous environment in their place of work where they can build something new, creative and artistic, where warmth, atmosphere and adventure are guaranteed. So, if we had to indicate a single motivational factor to return the two indicated, and apparently antithetical, alternatives – one that moves from a Humanism with aesthetic leanings and intended as a territory of harmony, balance and the man-measure of all things, the other that discovers human versatility, ambiguous and tormented, not in the perfect spread-eagle body of that famous Da Vinci drawing, but in looking at the sullen, tense, unsatisfied expression – to a common foundation, it could be Autonomy, made possible by the organizational conditions of Comfort and by the possibility of achieving maximum Self-Expression, the humanistic value par excellence.

Working along the epistemological trail of Autonomy implies that the company accepts and internalizes a vision that does not contemplate a definitive and all-inclusive description of the organizational actors. In which company management is interested in following, on the direct experience level, those specific characteristics that human beings can develop. It is management of living life, not of static life. Human beings preserve their autonomy, coherently changing with their own vital characteristics: the managerial context can start and foster, but cannot constitute their path of development. Growth of their own self-organization thus remains open to human beings, without a necessary connection to the idea of a dictated, predetermined programme.

From the Autonomy perspective, one can clearly see that the corporations must go forth and set up a space in which the various singularities find hospitality in a collective community. Comfort is the right name for this unimaginable space; in Italian, the term for comfort (in the sense of ease) is agio, which according to its derivation indicates nearby space (ad-jacens, adjacentia), an empty area in which it is possible for everyone to freely move, in a semantic constellation where spatial proximity borders on the opportune task (ad-agio, with leisure) and comfortableness with the right relationship. Comfort as a place to reach, where individuals can express themselves through that “free use of self” that, according to an expression of Hölderlin, is the “most difficult task”.

If recognition is the individual need emerging in contemporary society, free Self-Expression is the fundamental individual motivation; an appreciative, qualitative management mix, with ability for containment of the factors that characterize current work contexts, is the condition that cannot be renounced so to speak, so that possibility, the Self-Expression of oneself becomes daily emergence.

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