Otto Weininger on the character of man

sphere which was not sympathetic to Jews as such and which seemed to lead away from close association with other Jewish people. Otto’s dramatic death by his own hand at the age of 23 made people curious about him. His book gained a reputation at that time, though it was much misunderstood because of what he had to say about the character of woman. Within three years of his death it went into eight German editions and had been translated into English. By 1920 it had reached nineteen German editions.

Many casual or superficial readers of Otto Weininger’s book Sex and Character will think of it as a book about women, accusing them of many serious defects. This was not the intention of the author, nor, as the title indicates, is it the view taken in this lecture. In his preface Weininger calls the book ‘an attempt to refer to a single principle the whole contrast between man and woman’, and it was on this principle that he laid emphasis, saying that it contained the germ of a world scheme closely allied with the conceptions of Plato, Kant and Christianity. It is the nature of this principle that any serious reader of the book must first investigate, and with which this lecture is primarily concerned. Weininger himself wrote, ‘I attach more importance to appreciation of what I have tried to say about the deepest and more general problems than to the interest which will certainly be aroused by my special investigation of the problem of woman’. And he warns that the book ‘deals not with women but with woman’.

The word ‘man’ in the English language is ambiguous. And unfortunately in the present phase of the relationship between the sexes a great deal of stupidity is involved in the attempt to avoid using it. ‘Man’ may refer to humanity in general or to the male in particular. Weininger maintains that the defining character of mankind as opposed to the rest of nature is a specifically male character, and therefore the word ‘man’ in the title of this lecture can equally well be taken in either sense. All that Weininger says about woman is derived from a consideration of her in relation to this male character.

In considering how man is distinguished from the rest of nature it is easy to go through a list of many qualities in which man differs from animals, but we have to try to focus our attention on

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