itiswhatitis

It is what it is

by Bob on December 19, 2007

I keep hearing this expression "It is what it is" over and over again from people in various situations. And I keep wondering about its utility.

It is a logical tautology. It has to be true. But like all such expressions, the semantics of what is being said, over-rides the rules of logic.

What is seemingly being said is fatalistic. Taking things as in-the-moment, we can only accept what is reality and can't change what cannot seemingly be changed.

But therein lies the rub. Can something be changed and a course in time altered ? Perhaps it can, in which case we label this thinking as defeatist and fatalistic.

When referring to people, it's very hard, if not impossible to change people. Only rarely can we affect someone's hehaviour in a steady and lasting sense.

There are corollaries to this expression:

1. It is what it is

2. It was what it was

3. It will be what it will be

The most acceptable one is "it was what it was" because it is historical, if, of course, one believes, as most do, in the past, present, and future, and the linear progession of time marching on. Although, I might add, some very smart and profound thinkers have challenged this idea of linear time. From C.G. Jung to Lewis Carroll to Herbert George Wells and his time machine.

I think it's too easy to say "it is what it is". There is, in my opinion, an non-engagement with life itself in saying that, a kind of self-assuring complacency. And that is bothersome for most behaviour.

William James wrote about this implicitly in his brilliant, but perhaps to some scholars flawed, "Varieties of Religious Experience". And Ludwig Wittgenstein started out his brilliant Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with the first primordial premise: the world is all that is the case.

But perhaps, after all, it is indeed, what it is. Whisper words of wisdom and let it be as the Beatles sang.