Es ist was es ist erich fried englisch

In “Was es ist,” the German poet Erich Fried explores the conditions of love and identification. The poem begins:

“It is senseless

Says Reason

It is what it is

Says Love”

The poem continues with the same structure, as Insight (Einsicht), Caution (Vorsicht), and Experience (Erfahrung) all offer similarly discouraging remarks as the one given by Reason (Vernunft) while Love (die Liebe) adamantly responds with: “It is what it is” (Es ist was es ist).

Although this may seem to be like any other typical sappy romantic poem that attempts to affirm the power of love in the face of logic and reason, Fried’s brilliance comes from his precise usage of two different meanings of the verb “is,” or more specifically, “to be.”

Ontology differentiates between a number of different meanings of the word “to be.” The first meaning is “to be” of identification. When we use “to be” in this sense, we are essentially saying that the two nouns linked by “to be” are interchangeable, that a = b. For example, when I say “Batman is the Dark Knight,” I am saying that Batman and the Dark Knight are one and the same thing.

The second meaning of “to be” is of predication. This form of “to be” is meant to give more information about the subject. For example, if I say “Batman is tall,” I am obviously not saying that Batman and the concept of “tallness” are one and the same thing, but rather attempting to give information that would tell us about Batman’s physical features.

Returning to Fried’s poem, what we see in the stanza just given is a switch between “to be” of predication to identification. When the poem begins: “It is senseless,” Reason is attempting to inform its addressee that their romantic feelings are senseless using “to be” of predication. As mentioned before, this does not mean that these feelings are identical with senselessness, but rather that Reason is ascribing the quality of senselessness to the addressee’s feelings as a way of both explaining them and discouraging them.

When we switch to Love’s words: “It is what it is,” we have a switch to “to be” of identification. Love is attempting to say that these feelings simply are what they are, that they are self-same and identical with themselves through the tautological formula “it = it.”

This progression repeats throughout the poem, as Love reaffirms its tautological identification of “It is what it is” and rejects the numerous attempts to give “it” the qualities of senselessness, foolishness, and impossibility through “to be” of predication.

Thus what Fried shows here is that identification maintains itself only by refusing predication. In other words, identification is only possible if the identified object is not described in terms that would allow us to know it. Inherent within identification itself is an epistemological gap and to identify something is to not know it. Any attempt to identify someone as “lovely,” “intelligent,” “charming,” etc. is to sacrifice experiencing them as a singular unique person in order to explain them through more general preconceived categories that have already been given to us by language. As Freud once wrote: “to explain a thing means to trace it back to something already known.” To explain the way another person “is,” is simply to make them understandable by simplifying them into something we are already familiar with.

Therefore, the only correct answer to the question “What is love?” is tautology: It is what it is; love is love. The injunction of Love is to understand the beloved as an individual unique singularity and to refuse any temptation to make them knowable or explainable through external terms. To do anything else is to look at them through tinted glasses shaded with already-existing conceptions and the memories of past flames. To love is, to use Kierkegaardian terms, to make a leap of faith without the comfort of the teleology of the universal. Love can never rely on the comfort of reason, repeatability, or experience because Love in its true form is always about the radically New, the completely unprecedented Event that contains no already-written rules of engagement. To say “I love you” is to stare into the abyss of the Other and to affirm this void in the totality of its unfathomability. To do anything less is to make the mistake of Orpheus, to lose one’s Eurydice because he did not have faith that she was there.