Otto Weininger on the character of man

are

—

we know that everything is in continuous motion; everything is changing the whole time. In the material world even the most apparently durable substance is in fact always subject to growth or decay or change of some sort. There exists no absolute identity in the material world. We think of a table, a river or a mountain as a ‘thing’, and we think of plants and animals as living ‘things’ or ‘creatures’. But in all these cases it is a relative identity which we confer on them by thinking of them as ‘things’ or ‘creatures’ and using words to identify them. The table is just bits of wood joined together, which can as easily be pulled or fall apart. The water in the river is continuously changing as it flows down, so that, as Heracleitus said, ‘you cannot step into the same stream twice’. The mountain is only a very big heap of rocks and earth. It is we who call it a mountain. The plant dies and is dissolved again into nature. The animal also is subject to death and decay. It is indeed a conscious being, but it has no identity for itself, for it is not conscious of itself as a self.

In our inner consciousness we find the same continuous change. Our moods change, our ideas change. The stream of our consciousness is in perpetual motion. The clearest evidence of this can be found if one tries to concentrate on a single idea even for a few seconds. And yet I am conscious of being the same ‘I’ through all these changes of my thoughts and feelings. If I were not continuously the same T’, I could not assert that ‘A is A’, for unless I remained the same person during the time it takes me to say “A is A’, I would not be able to compare the second A with the first A and declare their identity. In this way the proposition ‘A is A’, which is not in fact true of anything I can experience, is affirming only my own identity.

But what is this ‘I’, this identity which does not change? It is beyond my experience. I experience my physical body and the sensations I get through it. I experience feelings and desires. I am aware of my thoughts. Both my physical body and my inner consciousness are in continual change. In order to know that they change ‘T’ must be unchanging. If it were not so, I could not know that the sensations, feelings or thoughts which I have now are different from those I had a few minutes ago, nor could I know that they belonged to the same ‘I’. So ‘T’ cannot possibly be an object of experience to me, since ‘T’ is the subject of all my