Otto Weininger on the character of man

no more than mean egoism’; and he deprecates what he calls ‘the present method of tying women down to the needs of her husband and children and forbidding her certain things because they are masculine’.

It is on the question of what used to be called the emancipation of women that Weininger’s position becomes most clear. The possession of a free intelligible ego is a male characteristic and does not belong to woman as such. But because there is no such thing as an absolute woman, women must be treated as free individuals and given equal rights with men. “No one’ he wrote, ‘has a right to forbid things to a woman because they are “unwomanly” ’, and he goes so far as to add, ‘neither should any man be so mean as to talk of his unfaithful wife’s doings as if they were his affair’. Nevertheless he warns against the danger of woman merely trying to liken herself outwardly to man, ‘for such a course’ he says, ‘would simply plunge her more deeply into womanliness’. It would not give her real freedom, but merely enlarge the range of her caprices. Real emancipation he defined as ‘the deep-seated craving to acquire man’s character, to attain his mental and moral freedom, to reach his interests and his creative power’. He maintained that it is only the male element in women that desires emancipation, for which he says the real female element has neither the desire nor the capacity. He concluded that woman ‘misconstrues her own character and the motives that actuate her when she formulates her demands in the name of woman’.

So far we have dealt only with the positive aspect ofman and the negative aspect of woman. It is not in his portrayal of these that Weininger should be criticised. Rather it is that having described so penetratingly the essential character of man and having given his critique of woman as the negation of this, he failed to see that opposites must be complementary. Therefore it is wrong to consider one of any pair of opposites to be unconditionally positive and the other unconditionally negative. Each has both its positive and its negative aspect, but the positive aspect of each, if not properly balanced with the positive aspect of its opposite, becomes exaggerated and turns negative.

The positive aspect of woman can be found in the myths of which we have spoken earlier. Woman represents in these the