Otto Weininger on the character of man

ethical principles which follow from this are the central subject of this lecture, and they were to Weininger himself the most significant part of his book. But since he called his book Sex and Character, and since he maintained that the specifically human character that has been outlined is also specifically male, it is necessary to enquire whether there is any rational justification for such a view. But it is also particularly necessary to embark on this enquiry with an open mind. Anyone, man or woman, who immediately rejects Weininger’s proposition without further thought as being absurd or, to use modern jargon, as mere male chauvinism is protesting against a case that Weininger himself did not make. It is true that he said things about women which would not nowadays be generally acceptable, but equally he anticipated many of the demands which are now being put forward by feminists. We will return to these later, although none of them have any relevance to Weininger’s main argument.

He is not talking about men and women, but about man and woman. He is trying to define the concept or the Platonic idea of maleness and of femaleness. And to make this quite clear he often refers not even to man and woman, but to M and W, as if they were algebraic symbols. It is unfortunate that the original English translation did not follow Weininger in this, for it might have avoided some misunderstanding. M and W, or the absolute male and the absolute female, do not exist anywhere. Everyone, Weininger insists, whether physically man or woman, has a combination of male and female characteristics in different mixtures and in different proportions in each person. Weininger does indeed refer to certain characteristics which he notes as belonging more particularly to men or women, but these are for illustration; they do not form his basic thesis, which concerns only the concepts male and female. He does, however, assert that men have in general more M in them and women more W.

The first thing to observe about those concepts is that they are opposite and complementary. That is to say that the qualities which make up the essential character of one are wholly lacking in the other. Taken all together they would make up a complete human person, but every actual individual is an incomplete mixture. That male and female are physically complementary does not require further argument, but there are some who main-

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