Sex And Character - Weininger Otto

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 (soul), 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 (or identically, “Jewish”) 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. (pp. 303-304)

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. (pp. 307-308)

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. (pp. 308-309)

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 (historical materialism); 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.

Reactions to suicide

Weininger’s suicide in the house where Beethoven had died—the man he considered one of the greatest geniuses of all—made him a cause célèbre, inspired several imitation suicides, and generated interest in his book. The book received glowing reviews by Swedish author August Strindberg, who wrote that it had “probably solved the hardest of all problems”, the “woman problem”. The book furthermore attracted the attention of Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, who claimed that “after Nietzsche there was nothing already in this contemporary German fleeting culture so remarkable.”