Otto Weininger
Otto Weininger was an Austrian philosopher who in 1903 published the book Geschlecht und Charakter, which gained popularity after his suicide at the age of 23. Weininger had a strong influence on Ludwig Wittgenstein, August Strindberg, and, via his lesser-known work Über die letzten Dinge, on James Joyce.
Life
Otto Weininger was born on 3 April 1880 in Vienna, a son of the Jewish goldsmith Leopold Weininger and his wife Adelheid. After attending primary school and graduating from secondary school in July 1898, Weininger registered at the University of Vienna in October of the same year. He studied philosophy and psychology but took courses in natural sciences and medicine as well. Weininger learned Greek, Latin, French and English very early, later also Spanish and Italian, and acquired passive knowledge of Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. While he was at the university, he would attend the Philosophical Society, where he heard, among others, Richard Wagner's son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who was regarded as an outsider but an original thinker.In the autumn of 1901, Weininger tried to find a publisher for his work Eros and the Psyche: A biological-psychological study, which he submitted to his professors Friedrich Jodl and as his thesis in 1902. He met Sigmund Freud, who did not, however, recommend the text to a publisher. His professors accepted the thesis and Weininger received his Ph.D. degree in July 1902. Shortly thereafter he became a Protestant.
In 1902 Weininger went to Bayreuth, where he witnessed a performance of Richard Wagner's Parsifal, which impressed him deeply. Via Dresden and Copenhagen he made his way to Christiania, where he saw for the first time Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt on stage. Upon his return to Vienna, Weininger suffered from fits of deep depression. The decision to take his own life gradually took shape; after a long discussion with his friend Artur Gerber, however, Weininger realized that "it is not yet time".
In June 1903, after months of concentrated work, his book Sex and Character: A Fundamental Investigation – an attempt "to place sex relations in a new and decisive light" – was published by the Vienna publishers Braumüller & Co. The book contained his thesis to which three vital chapters were added: "The Nature of Woman and her Relation to the Universe", "Judaism", "Women and Humanity".
Although the book's reception was not negative, it did not create the expected stir. Weininger was attacked by Paul Julius Möbius, professor in Leipzig and author of the book On the Physiological Deficiency of Women and was accused of plagiarizing. Deeply disappointed and seemingly depressed, Weininger left for Italy.
Back in Vienna, he spent his last five days with his parents. On 3 October, he took a room in the house at Schwarzspanierstraße 15, where Ludwig van Beethoven had died. He told the landlady that he was not to be disturbed before morning, since he planned to work and then to go to bed late. That night he wrote two letters, one to his father and the other to his brother Richard, telling them that he was going to shoot himself.
On 4 October, Weininger was found mortally wounded, having shot himself in the chest. He died in the Wiener Allgemeines Krankenhaus and was buried in the Matzleinsdorf Protestant Cemetery in Vienna.
''Sex and Character: A Fundamental Investigation''
Masculinity and femininity
Sex and Character argues that all people are composed of a mixture of male and female substance, and attempts to support this view scientifically. The male aspect is active, productive, conscious and moral/logical, while the female aspect is passive, unproductive, unconscious and amoral/alogical. Weininger argues that emancipation is only possible for the "masculine woman", for example some lesbians, and that the female life is consumed with the sexual function, both with the act, as a prostitute, and the product, as a mother. The woman is a "matchmaker". By contrast, the duty of the male, or the masculine aspect of personality, is to strive to become a genius and to forgo sexuality for an abstract love of the absolute, God, which he finds within himself.A significant part of his book is about the nature of genius. Weininger argues that genius never applies solely to a specific field such as mathematics or music, but there is only the universal genius, in whom everything exists and makes sense. He reasons that this quality is probably present in all people to some degree. Sex and Character became popular in Italy as an alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis due to the interest it generated among Italian intellectuals such as Steno Tedeschi, who translated the text to Italian.
Jewish versus Christian character
In a separate chapter, Weininger, himself a Jew who had converted to Christianity in 1902, analyzes the archetypal Jew as feminine, and thus profoundly irreligious, without true individuality, and without a sense of good and evil. Christianity is described as "the highest expression of the highest faith", while Judaism is called "the extreme of cowardliness". Weininger decries the decay of modern times, and attributes much of it to feminine character. By Weininger's reckoning everyone shows some femininity, and what he calls "Jewishness".In the chapter titled "Judaism" in his book Sex and Character Weininger, who has himself often been considered a paragon of the "Self-hating Jew" stereotype, writes:
I must, however, make clear what I mean by Judaism; I mean neither a race nor a people nor a recognised creed. I think of it as a tendency of the mind, as a psychological constitution which is a possibility for all mankind, but which has become actual in the most conspicuous fashion only amongst the Jews.... Thus the fact is explained that the bitterest Antisemites are to be found amongst the Jews themselves.
Further:
The true conception of the State is foreign to the Jew, because he, like the woman, is wanting in personality; his failure to grasp the idea of true society is due to his lack of a free intelligible ego. Like women, Jews tend to adhere together, but they do not associate as free independent individuals mutually respecting each other's individuality.
As there is no real dignity in women, so what is meant by the word "gentleman" does not exist amongst the Jews. The genuine Jew fails in this innate good breeding by which alone individuals honour their own individuality and respect that of others. There is no Jewish nobility, and this is the more surprising as Jewish pedigrees can be traced back for thousands of years.
A subsequent paragraph continues:
The faults of the Jewish race have often been attributed to the repression of that race by Aryans, and many Christians are still disposed to blame themselves in this respect. But the self-reproach is not justified. Outward circumstances do not mould a race in one direction, unless there is in the race the innate tendency to respond to the moulding forces; the total result comes at least as much from a natural disposition as from the modifying circumstances....
The Jew is not really anti-moral. But, none the less, he does not represent the highest ethical type. He is rather non-moral, neither very good nor very bad....
So also in the case of the woman....
In the Jew and the woman, good and evil are not distinct from one another.
Jews, then, do not live as free, self-governing individuals, choosing between virtue and vice in the Aryan fashion.
Critique of the ''[Zeitgeist]''
On Jewishness, decadence and femininity:Our age is not only the most Jewish, but also the most effeminate of all ages; an age in which art only provides a sudarium for its moods and which has derived the artistic urge in humans from the games played by animals; an age of the most credulous anarchism, an age without any appreciation of the state and law, an age of species ethics, an age of the shallowest of all imaginable interpretations of history ; the age of capitalism, an age of capitalism and marxism, an age for which history, life, science, everything, has become nothing but economics and technology; an age that has declared genius to be a form of madness, but which no longer has one great artist or one great philosopher, an age that is most devoid of originality, but which chases most frantically after originality; an age that has replaced the idea of virginity with the cult of demivierge. This age has also the distinction of being the first to have not only affirmed and worshipped sexual intercourse, but to have practically made it a duty, not as a way of achieving oblivion, as the Romans or the Greeks did in their bacchanals, but in order to find itself and to give its own dreariness a meaning.