Tautologies Can Create Dead Worlds

The tautology “It is what it is” made headlines when President Donald Trump uttered it during a recent interview with Axios’ Jonathan Swan. The abhorrent “it” in this context refers to tens of thousands of American deaths from COVID-19. The reference differentiates it from other uses of the tautology that saturate popular discourse to the point that you can buy it on a t-shirt.

It stands in stark contrast to more enlivening tautologies. It’s not an effort to get at what’s real, like Gertrude Stein’s “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”—the kind of phrase poet Lyn Hejinian says is part of Stein’s exploration of “realness,” of undeadening the world. The first “Rose” in Stein’s famous phrase, according to Hejinian, is someone’s name, though that is insider information.

A tautology is a rhetorical figure of speech, a species of desperate discourse, what John Martiall in the 16th century called a “foule figure.” In the instance in question, “It is what it is” counts as spontaneity designed as a communicative cul-de-sac. “It is what it is” does not invite a response. It defies interaction. In short, it stops conversation.

Recall the President’s habit of turning away abruptly from reporters’ questions during press conferences. Tautology is meant to have the last word, to condense all that needs saying (the unquestioned consensus seemingly established by the tautology), to highlight the pointlessness of communication. It is the equivalent of the mic drop. “It is what it is” becomes a synonym for “deal with it,” a criticism of the audience’s inability to cope with reality, coupled with self-congratulation by the speaker for already having traversed that reality.

In A Marxist Philosophy of Language, Jean-Jacques Lecercle says that a tautology is a grammatical marker of “the ideology of consensus” in that it “deliberately ignores economic, social, and political problems at the very moment it promises to resolve them.” The context for Trump’s Axios interview is one of historic national crisis. The United States faces a pandemic that threatens a staggering loss of life likely to surpass the number of American lives lost in the Second World War as well as an economic plunge rivaling the Great Depression. When questioned about the sepulchral circumstances, the urgency for national responses on several fronts, Trump tosses out a tautology, words intended to be undebatable, to suffocate meaning, to turn avoidable tragedy into a natural state of affairs.

The President’s tautology is cavalier with destruction and death, which is part of the reason Geoff Waite calls this defensive tactic—using tautology to “veil theologico-political violence” in what looks to the audience as filler—“destructively terrorist.” That might seem a hyperbolic phrase, but the President has talked about “beautiful world wars,” about doctors and nurses “running into death just like soldiers running into bullets” as “a beautiful thing to see,” and about “the purchase of lots of beautiful military equipment.” He seems almost gleeful discussing “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” that could be used on citizens who protest.

From a philosophical perspective, tautologies can lose their contact with everyday discourse. Logicians and philosophers sometimes want to take tautologies out of the wild, to ponder them in isolation. Think of visiting a tautology in an aquarium, in its own labeled glass tank. In such an environment, the assessment of tautologies takes on different features and consequences. For instance, Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Tractatus writes that tautologies are “sinnlos”: they lack sense. “They say nothing.” (4.461)

From a logician’s point of view, “there are no logical alternatives to a tautologous statement.” It’s closed-circuit reasoning, unfalsifiable, and, for some logicians, that’s a quality that makes tautologies powerful propositions. In the logical and philosophical arena, tautologies often appear as just that, faceless propositions—unassigned to a place in the world. A tautology, Wittgenstein writes, “does not stand in any representational relation to reality.” (4.462)

Thus, a tautology in isolation, on a t-shirt, as a faceless proposition unassigned to any speaker or situation, can seem senseless. “I assert that I think what I think, and that I do not think what I do not think”—the tautology that Nikolai Bukharin uttered before his execution in 1938—looks to be, inside the aquarium, a senseless tautology. If it “says nothing,” it must be harmless, inert. But it was not harmless to Stalin, who censored it. He read it as an esoteric message that Bukharin’s confession was not given voluntarily and should not be believed. The censored bit was not published until 1996.

Tautologies can do harm, which is why we could benefit from paying attention to Trump’s “It is what it is.” The President has given us, perhaps unconsciously, an utterance with foreseeable consequences, one of which will be further death for all of us from a manageable virus. “It is what it is” abandons us at a discursive dead end. As Roland Barthes warns us, “Tautology creates a dead world.”

Photo: Memento Mori, “To This Favour” by William Michael Harnett, courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art (Creative Commons license)

Bruce J. Krajewski

Bruce J. Krajewski is a translator and editor of Salomo Friedlaender's Kant for Children (forthcoming in 2024 from De Gruyter).