Otto Weininger on the character of man

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OTTO WEININGER ON THE CHARACTER OF MAN

Otto Weininger wrote only one book that claimed much attention. He lived between 1880 and 1903, and his book Sex and Character was translated into English and published in this country in 1906. His parents were Jewish. The families of both mother and father originated in Hungary and Czechoslovakia: his father worked as a foreign correspondent in a banking house but in later life became a craftsman and a goldsmith of some distinction. There were seven children in the family, Otto being the second, but he was the eldest son. Although the family roots were Jewish, the father did not side with other Jews in a conventional way, and Otto, on the day that he received his doctorate from the’ University, became a Protestant Christian.

Otto was a brilliant linguist, but he would not follow his father’s instructions and study at the Consular Academy for languages, but went to the University in Vienna where he at first studied medicine and later philosophy. He must have been quick to feel the importance of the growing activity in psychological studies, as we hear of him as a very young man attending an international conference of psychologists in Paris and making his own contribution to it.

It is unfortunate that a modern encyclopaedia entry about him states that his work was used as a text book of anti-semitism, In fact the text makes quite clear that Otto Weininger would have nothing to do with active hostility to anyone because they were Jewish. It is true that he had been brought up in a family atmo-

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