This article was born as a brief, dutiful account of a course, but it has turned — as is usual for me — into a transversal reflection. This time the core is the nature of my professional journey, a more personal and existential terrain than is customary here on the blog. It is, first of all, a tribute to Dr. Riva: it was her lesson that inspired this digression. With the next article we will return to the usual perimeter.

Professional development and soft skills

In May, we partners at Dentoni attended a soft-skills refresher course with Dr. Viviana Riva.
Viviana is an excellent speaker and a great motivator. With her help, we tackled head-on subjects such as time management, effective delegation, and clarity in interpersonal communication.
These are subjects largely neglected by the typical owner of small and mid-sized firms — often because of a mistaken perception of having no time to spare, partly because of a lack of scalable entrepreneurial vision, partly out of superficiality. We all believe, for instance, that we are “speaking plainly” and therefore expressing ourselves in unambiguous terms with anyone, whatever the intent we are trying to communicate.
While I am reasonably up to date when it comes to time management through to-do lists and calendars, I put myself on the line especially on the last point. It is true that I love writing, but it is equally true that writing is the process by which one comes to understand that one does not really understand what one is talking about. Writing forces us to think for real. If a writer does not truly understand what he is writing about, his readers have almost no chance of understanding him in turn. The effort of writing well is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility. And if writing well proves difficult even with all the time available to revise and correct the drafts, imagine how difficult it must be to be clear in the verbal communication of what we wish to convey to our partners and collaborators. Writing well is difficult for me too, however much I love it, because refining a thought made of images so as to communicate it clearly in words is anything but trivial.
I do not have much to recount second-hand about the subjects Viviana covered — I could not do her justice — but I can certainly recommend a consultation with her to anyone wishing to cultivate the right awareness to grow their company sustainably.

“The same disease”

I had first met Viviana, together with my partner and cousin Alex, at an introductory course on sustainable leadership and soft skills, held in March and addressed to the clients of one of our suppliers. Often, in such settings, one meets people who do not immediately value what is being discussed during the event. One of these had a clear passion for tennis, manifest in his bearing and on his phone in the minutes before each session. I was struck when, just before the start of one of the lessons, Viviana turned to this man and spoke with perfect naturalness about Jannik Sinner.
After the privately held course at Dentoni, I could not help reminding her of the episode and asking whether she really follows tennis or whether it had been a deliberate approach to build rapport with that person, so as to engage him more in the course. Viviana’s answer did not disappoint me: she played tennis as a girl and is still fascinated by the mental side of the game, but she is not a die-hard fan of any player and had indeed brought up the topic on purpose, to learn something more about that man, because — she explained to me — people always tell something more about themselves, and feel more seen, when they speak about something they truly care about.

In fact, this is exactly the kind of search I too have been carrying out, on and off for a long time, on this blog and that I have recently moved over to The Roots of Necessity: by writing spontaneously about what genuinely fascinates me, I have inevitably revealed something more intimate about myself.
Yet the link between this training experience and my own path and personal interests pushes me to dwell on these subjects one more time. For anyone who would like to know more, the journey on my Substack has just begun. A warning, though: it is not a path with the rarefied density of a pastry-shop blog — it is suited to long-distance swimmers of the inner waters.

To return to the main thread of this article: when the discussion was over, Viviana asked me why I had asked. I simply answered, “I always wonder why people behave the way they do, that’s how I am made.” She replied in turn with a very simple observation, but one that made me think and led me to write this article: “We have the same disease!” She meant, of course, the disease of why.

Which “whys”?

All curious people have their own disease of why. They differ in the direction toward which they orient their curiosity: science, literature, technology, psychology, God knows what… Thinking back to Viviana’s words, I asked myself what kind of disease of why mine really is.

In the room of my house where I am writing these lines, there is a large bookcase behind me. I glance at it and let my eyes look for the books I have owned since I was a teenager: Spinoza, Kant, Plato, Kundera. All of them are united, in their efforts, by the search for a why. Why we live, why we love and fall in love, what we can know, what reasons lie behind the lies we tell ourselves most often?

These are all themes that I will call, for brevity’s sake, great whys. And I call them so for two reasons.
First, they concern every human being capable of asking questions, by the mere fact of being alive and of being able to observe that we are only passing through this world.
Second, if we grasp even one aspect of these problems in a new way, something inside us changes forever. If I come to understand, by experience, what the love of God means as the love of the infinite (Spinoza), regardless of the individual things or persons that populate my life and experience, I can no longer be the same man as before.
If I come to understand the polarising nature of romantic love, the way Diotima explains it to Socrates in the myth of Eros narrated in Plato’s Symposium, I can no longer look at romantic infatuations the same way. ^[1]

I cannot hide from myself that these are the problems that genuinely interest me, that truly touch a sensitive chord in me, that draw me in without any effort on my part. These are the whys I am ill with — and psychology is part of them, hardly in passing.
The human conscience is like an onion: one layer of motivation conceals another, deeper and closer to the heart. Without peeling away the lies of which the superficial layers are made, one discovers nothing about oneself. The motivations of good psychologists interest me because I can borrow from them some tools to understand myself and others better.

By contrast, I take the liberty of calling small whys those that are resolved by the science of matter. Small is not meant to belittle either their complexity or, even less, their importance and profound beauty, but to highlight how their understanding — and, if anything, even the solution of scientific problems, marvellous as they may be — changes nothing in man’s inner orientation toward life.
Understanding the principles and consequences of Newton’s laws, or of relativity, does not make a scientist wiser; it only makes him richer in knowledge.

I believe this is what a great twentieth-century master, Moshe Feldenkrais, meant when he claimed that science is not concerned with the why, but with the how. Of course science answers, strictly speaking, whys: planetary orbits are elliptical because they are governed by Newton’s laws. But physics’ impulse toward the why stops at the mathematical formulation of a law and its experimental verification. There is no impulse toward a further why, neither toward a final cause nor toward a formal cause.
I have often meditated on the words of this man, with his brilliant intuitions about movement and posture, after practising many of his exercises to improve my relationship with my own body. Through his writings, Feldenkrais seems to have been a serene enough spirit to feel at ease exploring the small scientific whys — or, as he would have called them, the hows. Many great scientists are perfectly at home in the how.

In what follows, I shall simply call the great whys the whys, and I shall call the small whys the hows.

Physics and Management: how, how, how again

It may be because I have just finished reading Dante’s Purgatorio, the second part of the Divine Comedy. Centred as it is on the themes of confession and repentance, the second canticle inspired me to look into my own way of living the deadly sins. For reasons tied to the nature of this space, I will not dwell on it here, because I will have much more to say about the project I am developing on my Substack.

Still, it is worth making one consideration about the central theme of the Purgatorio: the confession of sin.

If the fundamental sin of the damned in the Inferno is pride — the pride that has locked them forever in their obstinate refusal of good and has irretrievably lost them — what saves the souls being purified in Purgatory is having repented in time of their sins, having recognised in time that we cannot save ourselves, in life, on our own.
I always have in mind the scene of the angel who admonishes Dante on the threshold of the gate that gives access to the mountain:

Cenere, or terra che secca si cavi,
d’un color fora col suo vestimento;
e di sotto di quel trasse due chiavi.
L’una era d’oro e l’altra era d’argento;
pria con la bianca e poscia con la gialla
fece a la porta sì, ch’i’ fu’ contento.
«Quandunque l’una d’este chiavi falla,
che non si volga dritta per la toppa»
diss’elli a noi, «non si apre questa calla.
Più cara è l’una; ma l’altra vuol troppa
d’arte e d’ingegno avanti che diserri,
perch’è quella che ‘l nodo digroppa.»

Canto IX (115-126)

[Literal translation: Ashes, or dry earth that is dug out, would be of one colour with his garment; and from beneath it he drew forth two keys. One was of gold and the other of silver; first with the white, and then with the yellow, he so worked the gate that I was content. “Whenever one of these keys fails, so that it does not turn rightly in the lock,” he said to us, “this passage does not open. One is more precious; but the other demands much art and ingenuity before it unlocks, because it is the one that unties the knot.”]

It is a highly symbolic passage: the gold key is grace, which man cannot dare to ask for, but which must be granted by God and is therefore the more precious — it is gold (più cara è l’una); yet the silver key comes first, and vuol troppa d’arte e d’ingegno avanti che diserri, because it is the one that truly unties the knot. It takes courage to confront oneself and to admit one’s own impotence and smallness.
This is what Dante must do all the way to the last canto of Purgatorio, when he finally purifies himself after admitting, in tears before Beatrice, the full depth of his guilt and the wretchedness of his own human weakness.

Dante’s reflection strikes me both for his acknowledgement of the role of destiny and for his identification of man’s fundamental task in this life: learning to tell the truth!
I have already spoken about the role of destiny and the illusion of freedom elsewhere, in my excursions on free will and on the nature of destiny itself (in Italian).
Learning to tell the truth is another story compared with reflecting on destiny — a further story. It can be undertaken independently of theoretical considerations on the nature of fate. And it is very difficult to learn not to lie to oneself, long before learning not to lie to others. And I am not thinking of the mechanical not-lying of the immodest who lack consideration for convention, but of the truth that inevitably hurts, because it reveals to us that we are not born masters of our own choices, and that, in order to become so, the price to pay is high and painful. The ego’s illusions of power must be torn down. Which hurts a great deal.

And so, here I am at the heart of the theme of this article. Why have I spent over twenty years working with the how, when I can clearly recognise that I am drawn to the whys?

I became, first, a physicist, starting at nineteen. Then I became the manager of the family business at thirty-three; and now I am forty. Twenty-one years have passed, so far, since philosophical and literary problems stopped occupying the majority of my days — not professionally, at least. They are always inside me, but I have not followed them.

I have learned to deal with the so-called real world, first through science and then through the management of money and of people. These journeys have been, and still are, for me a sort of university of the outer world, the company especially. I cannot say that these experiences have brought out only the best in me. Aggressiveness is required, sometimes cynicism and coldness, in order to take important and difficult decisions, especially in the corporate world. Sometimes a healthy burst of anger is needed — too bad I am not particularly good at managing it, given my temperament.

Both have been choices that have made my parents proud or serene, especially my father. And they have made me able to claim that I am not solely an awkward philosopher, ill at ease outside his own study; that I can move with greater confidence through the world, and feel at home with the forces of money and digital technology.
At the same time, I wonder when the moment will come at which the price paid, in years, for these choices will have been sufficient and, without a change, will start to become excessive.

With every white hair I see on my head, I feel the call of the desires of the boy who, inside me, is not dead, but has only stepped aside for years. He has stayed with me, and he has the same questions I have always remembered. The boy who, even during these twenty-one years of how, allowed himself to be obsessed with The Brothers Karamazov and The Master and Margarita, who has loved The Unbearable Lightness of Being for twenty years, and who still longs to reach the love of Spinoza’s infinite God.

I cannot say more, in this space, but my human weaknesses go far beyond having chosen a path that is, at least apparently, not aligned with my deepest inclinations. Yet I no longer wish to dismiss the subject quickly by telling myself that I have become more complete, that I have matured thanks to corporate life… all true, but one cannot run forever from what one is.

So I confess that I no longer quite know who I am, because I feel more and more that I am something beyond the roles that belong to me. This is not a matter of disowning everything I have learned by inhabiting them — lessons for which I remain profoundly grateful to destiny. But they are not for me.
Trained from adolescence and youth in dealing with the public here at Dentoni, I was a rather out-of-water fish in any physics department, however much my university transcript said the opposite; and I am still today an out-of-water fish in business life, however much the choices I have made so far have brought only great benefits to my company, with the inevitable small mistakes.
One cannot deceive oneself into thinking one is destined for a role just because one fills it well in the world’s judgement.
The answers are inside, not outside.

Nor do I feel any desire to identify with the garments of any other role I might be called to wear, after having felt uneasy in so many vestments.

I no longer wish to believe in my identifications: Dr. Serino, or the administrator of Dentoni, are not enough for me.
Perhaps it is enough for me to find a way to follow my own disease of why.

Mirko Serino

Postscript

Anyone who would like to follow more closely the path of exploration I have only sketched here — both for reasons of space and of opportunity — can find it online, in English, at The Roots of Necessity.

This article is dedicated to two extraordinary women.

To Dr. Viviana Riva, for her capacity to inspire those who listen to her.

And to my wife, Cerasela Maria Fasui, for her capacity to bear with my flaws and to give me back, every day, an honest image of my pettiness with immense love — far more than I could ever have deserved.

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1. Perhaps no one, before the twentieth century and Carl Jung, has described the projective nature of falling in love better than Plato.↩︎