Nostalgia is wishing to be a child (that is: viewing one’s own sins as a misfortune inflicted by others, which the criminal never does, who always feels himself guilty).
Space is related to chaos; its essence is in the setting of distance (sickness and aloneness are related), the three dimensions fly apart from each other, space has no unity, it is the collectivity of all externalised-ness of sensation, the entire I as the unconscious.
Where unity of consciousness is absent, as with the criminal, solitude is absent (“The I senses its own self, ” Rappaport), the sense of time is absent (because the various fragments of the ego, the unreal, nothing, are set as real, realised).
The saint (that is the inverse of the criminal, Christ, Augustine, Kant) suffers most heavily from the problem of time. The Greeks know no saints, which is why they know no problem of time.
Nature is immoral when man dissolves himself into nature, becomes animal, plant, matter, nothing, just as it is thus unconscious. Nature is moral, ethical, aesthetic as soon as it is known, that is: held together. Then a sense for nature is possible.
The criminal dies from inside (time), the sick person from outside (space).
Epilepsy must also be connected with time.
Whoever lies, is not.
The snake and wisdom (reverence).
When one is in a fog, which another knows very well as such, and catches sight of a terrifying form (imp-king), so is the other mentally aware of the situation. And it is beautiful. He is free! To the former – unconscious – it is evil, threatening to freedom, horrific.
The cracking noise of the room is inner snapping become unconscious.
The old maid is the nothing which emerges out of woman, who, for moral reasons, is no longer met with by the man who creates her. So no child appears. She goes completely to ruin.
Stealing is the making real of the not-real or the placement of things into the I which do not belong to the I.
The lie already speaks its definition of what is immoral the best: the making real of the unreal, or equally: placement into the I, where placement should not occur.
The moon (Luna) is the externalized dream. The sleepwalker is the platonic idea of the dreamer.
Fear of gnats is the other side of the love for birds.
It is noteworthy that to the criminal, nothing happens.
The criminal overcomes fear through hate, not through love. For hate also overcomes fear.
Whoever loves dogs, not cats, has nothing of the dog, that is: The dog is conscious in him, he embraces it like other objects, loves them, creates them anew, lives within them, attends them.
The criminal liar dies through the inner snakebite, the occasional liar through the outer (spatial) snakebite. But the criminal has thereby the hallucination of the snakebite and dies from mistaken shock.
Morality is perpetually above the intellectual; for the sorcerer can know everything, only not the Good (God, the idea).
The psycho-physical parallelism gradually becomes more complete:
My lack of strength.
Weakness, weaklings with regard to morality embody poor strength and courage: Jew and strength, Woman and strength.
Is it dependent upon the strength of a man whether he has sons or daughters?
People nowadays deliberate, the light of which falls upon hopes, to find a simple natural law according to which sex is regulated. Certainly this also stands under an ethical law. But a biological natural law of a process in which one is dealing with either the incarnation of a soul, or the arisal of a fleeting illusion-lie, as in the case of woman, cannot be. And at the very least it can, by way of experiment, be influenced by other factors. This is again valid for people. A method of intervention is totally impossible here. Just as little is a mechanical cause conceivable for the prevalence of male births.
Sex: moreover, often depends only upon the man.
Man and Woman – Something and Nothing.
Here is the key for the problem of the sex-determining cause.
The inner ambiguity of the Jew should not be confused with the chaos of the criminal.
And whoever should still not know even now what is un-Jewish and what is Jewish, let him immerse himself in the even-to-life awakening Adam of Michelangelo (in, from the altar wall, the fourth painting of the middle row in the Sistine Chapel), in that person in whom all lies still as possibility, but also in whom all possibilities truly lie – with the exception of one: Jewishness!
The Jew is from the beginning: and yet he cannot also signify an end. He is between beginning and end. Beginning and end, however, mean “action”. For that reason the Jew knows trade, not action.
The Jew is obtrusive toward Christ. Christ did not ride on a donkey for nothing. Donkey-cult among the Jews. The Jew is the castigation of the donkey: he is not stupid at all. That the Jews are now emerging in Germany is concomitant with the German “Michael”42. The Jew posseses all evil attributes, yet in a particular form: he smiles like the stupidity whose ethical correlate he is. Stupidity smiles at wisdom; the Jew smiles at Good. With this he places himself beside Good. He shows how even smiling can also be immoral.
It is immoral to ask, to beseech.
Howling gale in Macbeth: fate conquers and devours man.
The man who fails in suicide? He is the complete criminal, because he wants life in order to revenge himself. All evil is revenge!
42 From a German play called “Das Kalte Herz”. “The deutsche Michel” is the plain, honest, much-enduring, but slow, German. [Trans]
Vanity is : To want to count in the worth of the I what does not belong in the worth of the I. Thus also with individuality. This takes for its credit what is the credit of God.
The greater the work of art, the less chance is allowed to be there.
The criminal wants no witnesses. For through the criminal method he hopes to win and is defeated. Therefore he must kill all witnesses. They are all his doppelgangers.
Joy of the criminal in every crime.
The saint smiles without knowing why. He smiles unfreely. The saint is the most unhappy person, though he seeks only happiness.
The corpse belongs to God and not the Devil.
The Devil is the man who has all but the Good, knows the whole of heaven without Truth, while all exists only through the Good.
Every man creates his woman, perhaps two women for himself: a prostitute, a mother. Whether he makes a mother of her or not? It is dependent only upon his relationship to the ethical.
Woman is the sphinx?
There is no more deplorable nonsense and impression:
One imperatively wants to seek for something behind woman, because one would rather wait for all else than that there is simply nothing there. And so one arrives at the thought to identify her with the sphinx, which she has no similarity with whatsoever.
Christ saved Magdalene – she was a prostitute so long as he was in the wilderness.
Ultimately, how can I blame women for waiting for a man? The man also wants nothing but her. There is no man who would not take pleasure in exercising sexual effect upon a woman.
The hatred of woman is always only the not yet overcome hatred of one’s own sexuality.
Innocence is ignorance. To know and remain innocent would be the highest.
Man realises his own essence through things. Every realisation is redemption, system and substantiation is atonement.
Every realisation is rebirth.
IV
Otto Weininger’s Letters to Arthur Gerber
Vienna, 8th February, 1902.
I received your card.
Perchè? Studio o romanzo? Lavori tu o scrivi?43
Are you still not yet in a condition to read? I would, you see, very much like to conclude my notes and thoughts on “Peer Gynt”. Writing is very difficult for me at the moment, and I would gladly have used a conversation with you about that, to ease the self-formation of my thoughts. If, as things are, that is not possible soon, then I ask you merely about just the book. Io ho denari, vorrei restituirtene. 44
O. W.
2nd July, 1902
Dear Arthur Gerber!
Next week:
Thursday main examination45-, Saturday secondary examination.
If you are still here, we can see each other on Saturday afternoon.
Weininger
43 “Why? Is it your studies, or a novel? Are you working or writing?” [Trans] 44 “I have some money, and would like to repay you. ” [Trans]
45 Main doctorate examination. [Trans]
10th July, 1902
Cher coquin cadet!46
Have soundly passed the main examination today and they have, in great goodwill, even given me unmerited distinction . . .
Un vieux coquin. 47
Ischl48, 25th July, 1902
Dear Gerber!
It is not going well with me, within. Hope you are not doing all too badly at least. Please write to me, in Munich, poste restante (will not leave from there until 4th August), as it is in P. 49
Munich (Löwenbräu), 29th July, 1902. 5 pm.
Dear Friend!
I am going a bit better, at least I’m doing as though it were so. The mild but irresistible influence of Munich beer becomes noticeable even already. Munich has still brought forth no great man: all have stepped forth, none have stood firm. –
I have just come from the Schack Gallery. There hangs a copy of the greatest painting in the world, Michelangelo’s Jeremiah. I did not know until now that something like that can exist, that from a picture so much can stream forth.
Our parting has also thrown its shadow on my way.
46 “Dear knavish youngster!” [Trans] 47 “An old knave. ” [Trans]
48 Bad Ischl, Upper Austria. [Trans]
49 Pürkersdorf. Weininger’s home suburb in Vienna. [Trans]
And you? The thing for you is: control your passions, sans phrase. One has
