The Fear of Tautology as Esthetic and Ethic Category

The notion of the “fear of tautology” marks Joseph Brodsky’s poem “Notes of a Fern”: “But evil cannot befall a bad human, and the fear of a tautology is a guarantee of prosperity.” The poet thus inverts Socrates’ assertion that no evil befalls a good person. In the eyes of Brodsky, this assertion represented the epiphany of tautology. His viewpoint was that tautology is squandering one’s life trying to resemble and embrace the appearances and experiences of others. Whereas political and social systems gravitate towards tautology, literature helps one to differentiate himself from the crowd, avoid becoming a “victim of history.” Brodsky’s idea of tautology resonates with those of Mandelstam and Averintsev. Sergey Averinsev described Mandelstam’s dread of confining himself within a religious or ethnic identity as a “profound fear of tautology.” Finally, French philosopher Clément Rosset named tautology “the demon of identity” in the sense of it being sorcery and a magical circle. Advancing upon Rosset’s metaphor, it could be said that the fear of tautology is the desire to break the magical circle and drive the demon of identity into the trap of paradox and irony.