Otto Weininger on the character of man

out in Sophocles’ Oedipous Tyrannos when Oedipous is persistently questioning to find out whose child he really is. Jocasta already sees to what disaster it is leading and tells Oedipous that no good can come of his quest. She begs him not to continue, to which his answer, though he too senses disaster, is, ‘I must. I cannot leave the truth unknown’. It should be plain to everyone by now that just as in the Oedipous myth it was not particular individuals that were being portrayed, but representative archetypes, so too are Weininger’s ‘man’ and ‘woman’ only representative archetypes. He has many other anecdotal criticisms of women —how they like copying other people, fashions in clothes and hair-styles, feminine duplicity and so on—but they should be taken as being for illustration only. They do not constitute proof of anything, nor do they affect Weininger’s main definition of the distinguishing characteristics of M and W, to which they are not essential.

These criticisms of woman should not lead anyone to the false conclusion that Weininger was a misogynist. He made similar criticisms about the Jews, though he was himself a Jew and was by no means anti-semitic. He said of his book Sex and Character, ‘What I have found here will hurt nobody so much as myself”. It may be that his passionate pursuit of truth led him to envisage a standard of maleness which he felt he could not sustain, and that this was what led to his suicide.

It cannot be emphasised too much that Weininger is talking about the ideas Mand W and not about men and women. Even writing as he was at the beginning of the century he stands up for the rights of women in a way which might surprise some modern feminists. He wrote, “The present system (of education) stamps out much that is original, uproots much that is truly natural, and distorts much into artificial and unnatural forms. From time immemorial there have been only two systems of education; one for those who come into the world designated by one set of characters as males, another for those who are similarly assumed to be females. Almost at once the “boys” and “girls” are dressed differently, learn to play different games, go through different courses of instruction, the girls being put to stitching and so forth.’ And towards the end of the book he wrote, ‘men will have to overcome their dislike of masculine women, for that is

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