20 Weininger frequently mentions “neurasthenia”. A common dictionary definition is “an emotional and psychic disorder that is characterized esp. by easy fatigability and often by lack of motivation, feelings of inadequacy, and psychosomatic symptoms. ” For Weininger, however, neurasthenia also has a relationship to insanity, and reflects qualities of insanity. [Trans]
Gratitude and revengefulness are one and the same: a feeling of the single moment as real belongs to both: grateful as revengeful is the sadist, not the masochist.
When a woman, surprised in an unclothed condition, cries out, it is often only to be understood that she was fearing not looking good enough in it.
Disharmony is a tragic element in music. Precisely the greatest works of art in the world (Tristan and Isolde) have this tragic sharpness, and are more than beautiful.
The good aphorist must be able to hate.
Many a person believes he has become free of the one God, because he has devoted himself to several others.
Nothing is so often confused as obstinacy and energy – by the obstinate.
The mathematician is the opposite of the psychologist: he is the plain man, plain as space.
If man were not free, then he could not conceive of causality at all, and could not form any concept of it. Insight into lawfulness is already freedom from it, and the need for the (inner) miracle, the need for salvation, goes hand in hand with the
strongest feeling for causal connection in the empirical world. Windelband (Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, Vol. 1, 2nd ed. , p. 346)21 finds it remarkable about Hume that “the man who regarded understanding of causal relationships as thoroughly uncertain and, at the very most, probable, defends it in a series of brilliant investigations in the psychology of the will. ”22
On deeper inspection this apparent contradiction becomes a necessity. Mach and Avenarius are also such strong determinists that the question of free will hardly seems to exist for them, and yet both deny causality. This is explained by the fact that only the person who is permeated by empirical lawfulness feels the need to be free from it. Causality is understood, recognized, and posited by freedom. The criminal does not acknowledge causality, he wants to break through it: he wants to become suddenly free from, for example, a hump, or a limp – that is how little he acknowledges facts (for this reason his sense of reality is also limited). I believe Paul says: “It is an evil and criminal way that longs for signs. ” That is perfectly right. Only the criminal awaits a miracle from outside; the moral person would be ashamed of a miracle from outside; because he would surely be passive there. All bigots are criminals.
Transcendentalism is identical with the thought that there is only one soul, and that individuation is appearance. Here the monadological character of Kantian ethics flatly contradicts the “Critique of Pure Reason”.
The question whether there is one soul, or several, may not be posed; because the relations of the noumena transcend numerical expression.
Aesthetic and mathematical element (theory of proportion) in justice.
Spiritism and materialism are one, and are different stages through which the same person goes one after the other. The spiritual would lose its entire dignity if it materialized.
21 Wilhelm Windelband. The citation is found on p. 334 in the 1st edition (1878). [Trans] 22 In Hume. op. cit. , Vol. II. “Of the Passions”. [Trans]
To understand a person completely (Kant or Fechner), is to master him.
The masochist is attractive to the hysterical woman (woman as plant), the sadist is attractive to the non-hysterical (woman as animal).
The nagging woman is not, as I believed (Sex and Character [E. pp. 272-3]), the opposite of the hysteric, but the opposite of the lady.
Gentleman and lady belong together, just as henpecked husband and nag.
The need to be loved grows with the feeling of being pursued, and is proportional to it.
Where a man steals, a woman is merely envious.
Double concept of the miracle: There is either one miracle, which man yearns for (which promises to bring redemption; need for the miracle as the need for redemption), or many miracles, that are confirmations of faith, confirmations so to speak of the laws of Heaven, if not also of the laws of mathematical physics.
One should separate the two.
It also happens that someone impresses one because he stands far below one – when one does not understand him.
Three things constitute the philosopher, three elements must come together to produce him.
A mystic, A scientist, A systemiser(opposite: sadist) (opposite : artist) (opposite : experimenter)
The mystic ) only yields a theologian, a
scientist ) dogmatist of some kind of belief.
The mystic ) yields a theosophist, who simply follows his individual
systemiser ) intuition, without striving for proof and certainty.
The scientist ) yieldsa theoretical physicist, biologist etc.
systemiser )
The mystic can be unequivocally defined by the problematisation of the Absolute and Nothingness. Most striking is the problematisation of time. The scientist is defined in “Science and Culture”;23 he is the transcendental person (Kant as non-mystic), he seeks complete acceptance for everything he says, and refutation of all counter-possibilities.
The systemiser is the opposite of the technician and experimenter; there are theoreticians and technicians in every science. Thus in mathematics:
23 “Science and Culture” is an essay in Weininger’s “Über die letzten Dinge” (“On Last Things”) [Trans]
Technician Theoretician
Euler RiemannIn linguistics: Pott Humboldt
(Bopp)In physics: Faraday Maxwell
both in high measure: Helmholtz and Darwin among others.
Age is death, youth is life. The greater a person is, the less he ages, and the less his will gets weaker with age.
However, there is no one besides Jesus Christ who would not have wanted less in his old age than in his youth. That is shown in the musically weak Parsifal (which is intellectually a fresher, more powerful conception than its musical execution suggests; even though its themes, the grave and flower motifs, but also the Holy Communion and Parsifal motifs in the variation of Act III, belong among the greatest). It is shown above all by Ibsen, whose will has two culminating points, a highest, Peer Gynt, a lower, Rosmersholm, but who otherwise moved in a steadily descending line; it is also shown by Beethoven, whose art attained its greatest height in the Appassionata and especially in the “Waldsteinsonate” (third movement, where it came near almost to God), but then however diminished; the “Ninth” is not Beethoven’s greatest work.
The criminal (as slave) often seeks a person of great perfection (and here, as a judge of people’s imperfection, is much harsher than a good man), because he so wants to obtain belief from outside (not through an inner change of mind). If he believes he has found such a person, he gives himself up to him in the most complete slavery; and searches obtrusively for people to whom he could serve as a slave. He also wants to live as a slave so as never to be alone.
If a third person then enters the circle, the criminal is perplexed; for clearly one cannot be a servant to two masters at the same time, but the criminal is a servant to every person (whether free or unfree) by whom he is with.
Problem of two people,
Problem of three people.
Crowd psychology begins with four.
Phenomena of “attitude”. One writes to every person differently, and often even in different hand-writing.
The greater the grace that a man receives from God, the greater the sacrifice that he will bring to God for it. Grace and sacrifice were at their greatest in Jesus.
Evidence can only appeal to the ultimate laws of thought. These are immediately evident; this evidence is grace.
Worth: power = light: fire.
There are no degrees of truth, no degrees of morality.
Original sin occurs continually: the eternal and the temporal are there beside each other .
Distinction between genesis and codification of superstition. Code: farmer’s almanac. Genesis: guilt.
The difference between the amoral (woman) and anti-moral (criminal), like their kinship, is that woman wants to be degraded, while the evil man degrades himself.
A person always achieves the deepest understanding of his self and his destiny only if he has become untrue to himself, if he has transgressed against his destiny (God), through sin. Perhaps that is why life on earth is necessary, so that God may find himself – for consciousness is only possible through opposition.
Annotation
An excursus appended to the earlier revision of Sex and Character, attempted to uncover morphological and parallel psychological analogies among mouth, throat and anal-genital regions, and additionally to ascertain
