Otto Weininger on the character of man

higher emotions of which man has a vision when he falls in love, seeking that which is lacking in his maleness. In the wider sphere she represents community. To our unimaginative modern minds it may seem far-fetched when in the wedding service marriage is said to signify the mystical union between Christ and his Church. But this means the same as the uniting of the prince and the sleeping princess. Vladimir Solovyov, about whom I spoke in an earlier lecture, envisaged Sophia, the divine Wisdom, as the perfect Community of Mankind, which is what the Church is meant to represent. The wedding ceremony thus symbolises the union of Christ and Sophia, the individual and the community, the mind and the emotions, in perfect attainment. Those who cavil at Christ’s being male fail to realise that the Holy Spirit as Sophia is feminine. And perhaps they forget the assertion in the Athanasian Creed concerning the three Persons of the Holy Trinity that ‘none is afore or after the other: none is greater or less than another’.

The negative aspect of man is all too plain to see in the world around us. It exists in intellect and individualism run riot, in idea which has taken off so far that it defies all commonsense. As Weininger wrote, ‘A woman is never so stupid as a man can be’. It needed men to invent our present financial system, which may be well designed to give power to a few individuals and enable a lot of men to play esoteric games with numbers, but bears no significant relationship at all to the real economy and serves only to hinder the free and equitable distribution of wealth. No one but men would use science to enable them to pile up enough lethal weapons to destroy half the world several times over, instead of using the same resources to feed hungry millions and allow them to live in comfort. Individual greed and ambition are the negative male qualities which need to be neutralised by a sense of community. Weininger denied that sympathy and compassion, which are concerned with community, are ethical qualities, because they are mere feelings, and not acts of individual freewill. But if the balance between intellect and feelings, between freedom of the individual and the well-being of the community, is ignored, then war and poverty are the inévitable results.

The so-called feminist movement in the Western world today bears out Weininger’s claim that it is only the maleness in women

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