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Sex & Character

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This book is a reprint of the 1906 translation of the first edition of Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter (1903). Before he died, Weininger made many corrections and improvements which appear in the second and later editions.

The 1906 translation is notoriously inaccurate and incomplete. A proper and complete translation of the second edition is in the final stages of preparation, and will soon be available from the Indiana University Press.

Wait for it.

_Sex and Character_ by Otto Weininger is an interesting, if odd, book on the ontological natures of male and female. Weininger was a Jewish resident of Vienna during the first years of the 20th century (1903) when he wrote this book at the age of 23 and committed suicide shortly thereafter. What makes this book historically significant is that several authors, such as Freud and James Joyce, noted it and drew upon it in their work. Weininger's work was also known and praised (but doubtfully read) by Adolf Hitler. Weininger himself derives his ideas from Plato, Goethe, Kant, and Schopenhauer, resting in the German Idealist tradition. Weininger's basic premise is that the material world is a lower, feminine existence, and the higher world of ideal forms is masculine. He rejects the Darwinian explanation of human origins, noting that mankind has fallen from the state of the "masculine" ideals, such as individuality, worth/value, love and will and opposes them to the organic, "feminine" phenomena like pleasure, sexual desire, limitation of consciousness and impulse. Weininger concludes that women "do not actually exist" in an ontological sense because they belong to matter, which on a philosophic, esoteric level, has absolutely no meaning--only form gives a particle of matter or an idea a meaningful essence as a "thing-of-itself." His book is full of similar misogynist statements and he errs when he says that women do not have souls. He examines the phenomenon of prostitution from an interesting methodology by comparing the ideal "Absolute Mother" with the "Absolute Prostitute." The Mother's function is to perpetuate and care for the race, while the Prostitute is a more subversive character "outside of the race" concerned only with sexual pleasure as an end in itself and not with procreation. The Prostitute is a rationally unexplainable phenomenon amongst mankind something that is universal and whose origins do not necessarily have to do with economic disadvantages on the part of women. Weininger's chapter on Judaism compares the Jewish people as a unit to the feminine impulse of "pairing": that of finding and arranging marriages and sexual unions. The drive to pairing and matchmaking makes the Jews somewhat of a danger to Western (labeled "Aryan") man because it leans toward dissolution rather than construction, and therefore form. There is also a total dichotomy between the cosmological outlooks of Christianity and Judaism and that in the future, according to Weininger, there will be only two choices for mankind, Christianity and Judaism. Although noted for his "anti-Semitic" views, Weininger actually spends much of his book dealing with his philosophy of what constitutes a genius. A genius is a man who has attained a sense of mystical oneness with the universe, being able to place himself in proper perspective with the cosmos and the rest of humanity. For Weininger, genius actualizes itself in the fields of philosophy and art rather than science and mathematics, because philosophy and art deal with universal concepts whereas the sciences concern themselves only with equations and empirical data. The greatest geniuses are the founders of religions such as Christ and the Buddha. Regarding the question of women's emancipation, Weininger says that only the more masculine women are agitating for it as a political and social agenda. The reason that the "feminist" movement has been so successful is simply because so many modern women are in fact simply biologically and spiritually masculine in character (and many men are correspondingly feminine). _Sex and Character_ lacks internal cohesion in some points especially towards his conclusion, but it is altogether a welcome diversion from the PC feminist rhetoric so popular today.