Collected Aphorisms Notebook And Letters To A Friend, Otto Weininger
Chapter I, Aphoristic remarks
Chapter II, Last Aphorisms
Chapter III, Notebook
Chapter IV, Otto Weininger’s Letters to Arthur Gerber
Chapter V, August Strindberg’s Letters about Weininger
Chapter VI, Appendix – The German Tex
Chapter VII, Aphoristisch-Gebliebenes
Chapter VIII, Letzte Aphorismen
Chapter IX, Taschenbuch
Chapter X, Briefe — Otto Weiningers
Chapter XI, Briefe – August Strindbergs
Motto:
Every true, eternal problem is an equally true, eternal fault; every answer an atonement, every realisation an improvement.
Weininger
The cross in Golgotha cannot redeem thee from evil, Where it is not also erected in thee.
Angelus Silesius
I
Aphoristic remarks
(Including the psychology of sadism and masochism,
the psychology of murder, remarks about ethics, original sin, etc. )
The highest expression of all morality is: Be!
Man must act in such a way that the whole of his individuality lies in each moment.
Sleep and dreams undoubtedly have something in common with the state before our birth.
Algebra is conceptual, arithmetic intuitive.
The present is the form of eternity; judgement concerning the actual has the same form as judgement concerning the eternal. Connection with morality, which wants to transform all present into eternity, to take into the narrowness of consciousness all the breadth of the world.
What also always leads to determinism is the fact that struggle is made necessary continuously. In a particular case the decision may follow quite ethically, and man may decide himself for the Good; yet the decision is not lasting, he must struggle anew. There is freedom, one might say, only for the moment.
And that lies in the concept of a freedom. For what kind of a freedom would it be which I, through a good act from some earlier time, had brought forth, caused, for all time? It is the very pride of man that he can be free anew at every moment.
So for the future, as for the past, there is no freedom; man has no power over them.
That is why man can also never understand himself: For he is himself a timeless act; an act which he performs continuously, and there is no moment in which he might not perform it, as there would have to be to understand himself. 6
Morality expresses itself thus: Act in full consciousness, that is, act so that in every moment you are whole, your entire individuality is there. Man experiences this individuality over the course of his life only in successive moments: that is why time is immoral and no living person ever holy, perfect. If man once acts with the strongest will so that all universality of his self (and of the world, for he is indeed the microcosm) is set in the moment, then has he overcome time and become divine.
The most powerful musical motifs of the world’s music are those which attempt to represent this breaking through time within time, this breaking forth out of time, where such an ictus7 falls on one note that it absorbs the remaining parts of the melody (which represent time as a whole, individual points integrated by the I) and thereby transcends the melody. The end of the Grail motif in Parsifal, and the Siegfried motif, are such melodies.
There is however one act which, so to speak, resorbs the future into itself, experiences in advance all future falling back into immorality already as guilt, no less than all past immorality, and thereby surpasses both: a timeless positing of character, rebirth. It is the act through which genius arises.
It is a moral demand that in every action the whole individuality of the person should become apparent, each should be a complete overcoming of time, of the unconscious, and of the narrowness of consciousness. Most of the time however, man does not do what he wills, but what he has willed. Through his decisions, he always gives himself only a certain direction, in which he then moves until the next moment of reflection. We do not will continuously, we only will intermittently, piece by piece. We thus save ourselves from willing: principle of the economy of the will. But the higher man always experiences this as thoroughly immoral. Present and eternity are connected; timeless, universal, logical reasonings have the form of the present (logic is achieved ethics): and so also should all eternity lie in every present. We also must not determine ourselves from within; this last danger too, this last deceptive appearance of autonomy, is to be avoided.
6 Parsifal motif (variation), Act III, (“The hallow’d spear, I bring it back to thee”. ) [Rappaport]
7 ictus n L, lit. , blow, fr. icere to strike: the recurring stress or beat in a rhythmic or metrical series of sounds. [Trans]
Will! that is: Will yourself entirely!
What is right in socialism is that every man should strive to seek and find, just as his own self and particular nature, even yet his own property; and here his possibilities must not be restricted from the very beginning from outside.
A man can be proud of acquired riches, and rightly look up to them as up to a moral symbol of inner work, also.
Psychologism8 is the most comfortable conception of life, because according to it there are no longer any more problems. That is why it also condemns all solutions from the outset, since it acknowledges the actual problems as little as the idea of truth.
There is no such thing as chance. Chance would be a negation of the law of causality, which demands that even the temporal meeting of two separate causal chains still has a cause. Chance would destroy the possibility of life; it would call back man, who is the only one ready to overcome evil, from his path. Chance would make telepathy impossible, which is nonetheless a fact. It would nullify the connectedness of things, the oneness of the universe. If there is chance, then there is no God.
Lovecreates beauty )
Belief creates being )but they allcreate life.
Hope creates happiness )
Hate – hideous
Unbelief – nothing Pain is the mental correlate of destruction. (Sickness and death.)
Fear – pain.
8 A theory that applies psychological conceptions to the interpretation of historical events or logical thought. [Trans]
Pleasure is the mental correlate of creation. Lust is accompanied by intense pain, because in it creation and destruction are merged.
Pain: fear = being: willing
Pleasure: love = being: willing.
The non-being of the criminal9 is thus the worst pain, and in the true sense hell.
Hope–fear : psychology of the gambler. Every compulsive gambler suffers greatly from fear.
Do plants know pleasure and pain? Orchids? Lust in mating seems to be missing in them! Hermaphroditism of plants!
The narrowness of consciousness and time are not two different things, but one and the same. Contrary to that is the parallelogram of forces, where two different movements unite in a single one, and can be performed by the same body at the same time. Mentally this is alternation, or even oscillation.
The inner life of plants then, must be one in which the narrowness of consciousness is absent. This corresponds with the fact that the plant cannot move itself and has no sense organs; for the development of motility and of sensibility are always parallel and belong to each other. The narrowness of consciousness (time) is the form of movement of the mental.
9 Weininger frequently uses the word “Verbrecher” (literally, “criminal”), in the broader sense of the word, to refer to a person who breaks the moral law, such as one who lies or is illogical. This kind of criminal should not be confused with one who only breaks laws of the state.
Work – Creation | Pain – Pleasure.
Nietzsche is of course right that there is no such thing as murder with robbery. There is no murder for the sake of money. Yet robbery is not the murderer’s “suggestion of poor reason”, but rather a part of the murder: robbery is a complete killing. The victim would still have reality if he possessed money: therefore he must be robbed, i. e. , be completely killed.
Of all the problems that may in principle be solved, the most difficult is the relationship of the will to worth, or, which is the same, of man to God. Does the will create worth, or worth the will? Does God create man, or does man first actualise God? Does the will grasp the Good, or does the Good seize upon the will? This is the problem of grace, the supreme and final problem within dualism, while original sin is the problem of dualism itself.
It is, I believe, to be solved this way:
Worth itself becomes will, when it enters into relation with time; for the I (God) as time is the will. Creation of the will or of worth is therefore completely out of the question; here the problem shows a proximity to original sin. Will however is worth (man is God), when it becomes completely timeless; worth is a boundary prescence to will, and will is a boundary prescence to worth. When God becomes time, then he becomes will, i. e. , as soon as being has entered into a relationship with non-being. All will only wills to go back to being (says original sin), and is something between non-being and being. We cannot speak of creation. As the eye is related to the sun, so is man to God. The sun does not exist because of the eye alone, nor the eye because of the sun.
Idiocy: crudeness’ intellectual equivalent.
Epilepsy is total helplessness, falling sickness, because the criminal has become the plaything of gravitation. The criminal does not come forth. The epileptic feels as though the light goes out and absolutely every external support fails. Ringing in the ears with the seizure: perhaps, when light fails, sound enters. The epileptic hallucinates
