Otto Weininger on the character of man

a central defining principle from which all these differences can be derived. We cannot do better than start from the ancient wisdom which tells us that whereas the consciousness of plants is equivalent to that of deep sleep and that of animals to dreaming consciousness, only man has true waking consciousness. Or to put this in another way, animals are conscious, but only man is selfconscious. Self-consciousness means to be conscious of oneself as a self; to be conscious of one’s own identity. Most of us take this for granted without giving it much thought. We forget that selfconsciousness has had to be achieved with great effort. Very young children are hardly aware of their identity. They develop quite a long way in speech before they refer to themselves as ‘T. At first they refer to themselves only by their proper name, that is the name by which everyone else calls them. To others, and to itself, the child is, as it were, an ‘object’. The true awareness of identity is not born until the child realises itself as a ‘subject’, calling itself by the name which no one else can use in reference to it, but which every other ‘subject’ uses in reference to himself or herself.

It is when we try to enquire what identity really is that we realise how great a mystery it is. For it exists only in idea, not in actuality. The notion identity is most precisely expressed in the logical proposition that A is A. To most people this proposition says nothing. It is merely a glimpse of the obvious. It does not tell us anything about what we call the real world. We have learnt nothing new as a result of it. We are not told what A stands for, and whatever it stands for, the proposition “A is A’ does not assert that it actually exists. It tells you nothing about the world of our experience. But this does not mean that it says nothing. It affirms the reality of the concept identity. And, as Weininger points, out, since it does not affirm the identity of any object, for it does not even assert the existence of any object, it can affirm only the identity of the subject. The only possible meaning of the proposition ‘A is A’ is the affirmation that ‘I am’.

This looks rather like trickery or sleight of hand. How can we turn ‘A is A’ into ‘I am’? Identity means that something is what it is and that it stays the same—absolutely the same—through all the changes of a continuously changing world. In our experience

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