On 4 October 1903, a 23-year-old man went to the house where Beethoven had died in Vienna and shot himself. Otto Weininger felt himself to be a great genius; he hoped in his final moments to absorb some of Beethoven’s lustre. It worked. The obscure book he left behind, Sex and Character, rapidly gained the recognition its author craved. Weininger’s theatrical suicide inspired copycats and attracted admirers. The Nazi grandee Dietrich Eckart, Hitler relayed to his dining companions in December 1941, said that Weininger was the only respectable Jew he’d ever encountered — because he took his own life “once he recognised that the Jew lives on the decay of other peoples”. (This didn’t count for much, in the end; Weininger’s writings were banned in the Third Reich anyway.)
Sex and Character found particular success among tortured, brooding young men like its author. Ludwig Wittgenstein read it as a schoolboy, and remained devoted to it for the rest of his life. In a letter to his protégée, Elizabeth Anscombe, he favoured Weininger above Kafka: Kafka gave himself a “great deal of trouble not writing about his trouble”, whereas Weininger had the courage to face it all head-on. Weininger provides Ray Monk’s masterly biography of Wittgenstein with its master-theme. What Wittgenstein took from Weininger was the “twist” to Kant’s moral law that Monk made the subtitle of his book: “The Duty of Genius.”
Most who read Sex and Character today find their way to it via Wittgenstein. In August 1931 Wittgenstein remarked to G.E. Moore that Weininger “must feel very foreign to you”, and he is bound to feel even more foreign to the 21st-century reader. His intricate intermingling of misogyny with antisemitism is as baffling as it is off-putting. Yet although he makes an apology, early on, that the book “is for the most part not of a quality to be understood and absorbed at first glance”, it is surprisingly readable. Sometimes it rings familiar. Weininger combined ideas which we now would find only in the more esoteric corners of the online Right with ideas which are nowadays espoused in gender studies departments. He’s Judith Butler meets Bronze Age Pervert.
The main target of Sex and Character is femininity. Weininger knew his book was liable to offend its few female readers; he notes at the beginning that nothing would “rehabilitate” him in their minds. He was not so distressed at the thought of their disapproval. “The male,” he writes, “lives consciously; the female lives unconsciously.” Women do not think thoughts but rather what he called “henids”: half-baked notions more akin to feelings. Women are gossipy, sensual, vacuous. Their one love in life, so we are told, is matchmaking.
Yet when Weininger speaks of men and women, he is not speaking of biological categories. He is, in fact, an early critic of biological essentialism and a proponent of gender fluidity. All people, he claimed, are a mixture of maleness and femaleness; all exist along a spectrum, in various “transitional forms”. Weininger presented his argument as a “complete revision of facts hitherto accepted”, and it is a revision which has kept a foothold ever since.
Those few women whom Weininger liked or respected thus turn out to have been men all along. “These so-called ‘women’ who have been held up to admiration in the past and present, by the advocates of women’s rights, as examples of what women can do, have almost invariably been what I have described as sexually intermediate forms.” George Eliot was more man than woman; in her movements as in her prose she “lacked all womanly grace”. Weininger remained firm in his conviction that in the “real female”, talent is “rare and feeble”, and therefore that talented women (often lesbians) were basically men.
Sex and Character isn’t just a series of armchair speculations; Weininger also ventured into the field, so to speak. Part of the book is devoted to the “laws of attraction” governing sexual relationships. Weininger believed he had discovered the basic law, for which “almost every couple one meets in the street furnishes a new proof”. The law dictates that everybody seeks their sexual complement. If an individual is three-quarters male and one-quarter female, they will be most attracted to one who is one-quarter male and three-quarters female. Weininger proved this law by showing pictures of women to his male friends and guessing who they would find most attractive (he boasts about his perfect score). This law, he added, offered an obvious “cure” for homosexuality: “sexual inverts must be brought to sexual inverts, from homosexuals to Sapphists, each in their grades.” That is to say, the most effeminate gay men (who are, as Weininger would have it, basically women), ought to be set up with the manliest lesbians (basically men) — and that way constitute a heterosexual pairing, by anybody’s definitions. “Knowledge of such a solution,” he hoped, “should lead to the repeal of the ridiculous laws of England, Germany, and Austria directed against homosexuality.”
Real salvation, however, could be achieved only in celibacy. Weininger’s answer to the “Woman Question” is that “man must free himself of sex”. His misogyny is not therefore one which calls for the subjection of women, but rather their total obsolescence: he is much closer to Nick Fuentes, who preaches that “having sex with women is gay”, than Andrew Tate. The ordinary objection to universal celibacy — that human beings would go extinct — is no match for Weininger’s ferocious intensity. Such an objection is impious, since it denies eternal life after death for those who merit it, and cowardly, too; he is scathing about St. Augustine for weaselling out of the logical conclusion of his premises.
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SubscribeAfter a quick google, turns out that this “Godfather” was just 23 years old when he did away with himself; nowhere near enough life experience to form a judgement about anything, especially something as important as the subject of his book.
It appears that later intellectuals took a good deal of notice, as did those with a political axe to grind. What fools they appear, to have done so.
You didn’t really need to google. His age at death is stated in the very first sentence of the article.
Ha, yeah! But i had a quick google anyway to find out a bit more and that’s where i recalled it from.
Not a well-known figure in the Anglosphere, but a useful article in drawing attention to the same issues being thought about more than a century ago, albeit in a jejune kind of way.
Otto Weininger had some, umm, ‘interesting’ views on the English too, which he was able to fit quite satisfactorily into his Weltanschauung. From Chapter 13:
This is also the place to remember the similarity between the Englishman and the Jew, which has often been emphasized since Richard Wagner. For of all the Germanic peoples, they certainly have the closest affinity with the Semites. Their orthodoxy, their strictly literal interpretation of the Sabbath rest points to this. There is often hypocrisy in the religiosity of the English, and not a little prudery in their asceticism. Also, like women, they have never been productive either through music or religion: there may be irreligious poets – they cannot be very great artists – but there are no irreligious musicians. And it is connected with this why the English have never produced a distinguished architect, and never an eminent philosopher. Berkeley, like Swift and Sterne, is an Irishman; Eriugena, Carlyle and Hamilton, like Burns, are Scots. Shakespeare and Shelley, the two greatest Englishmen, are by no means the summits of humanity, nor do they even come close to Dante or Aeschylus. And if we now look at the English “philosophers”, we see how, since the Middle Ages, the reaction against all profundity has always emanated from them: from William of Occam and Duns Scotus, through Roger Bacon and his namesake the Lord Chancellor [Francis Bacon], Hobbes, who was so kindred in spirit to Spinoza, and the shallow Locke, up to Hartley, Priestley, Bentham, the two Mill, Lewes, Huxley, Spencer. But this already lists the most important names in the history of English philosophy, for Adam Smith and David Hume were Scotsmen. Let us never forget that soulless psychology came to us from England! The Englishman has impressed the German as a capable empiricist, as a realpolitiker in the practical as well as in the theoretical, but that is the end of his importance for philosophy. There has never been a very deep thinker who has stopped at empiricism; and there has never been an Englishman who has independently gone beyond it.
A guy who committed suicide at 23 MORE THAN 100 YEARS AGO may be interesting to learn about but he’s no godfather of anything.
I’ve never heard of Weininger, nor his book. The idea that he is somehow the “godfather” of the manosphere is ludicrous. It’s long overdue that Unherd gave a platform to anti-feminists to counter the many feminist contributors here.
I can recommend a far more interesting alternative book, which looks very prescient today, Ernest Belfort Bax’s “The Fraud of Feminism” (1913).
Mike Buchanan
JUSTICE FOR MEN & BOYS
The problem is most “anti-feminists” are misogynists. The antidote to modern feminism is not some half-baked internet men’s right movement, but a return to the traditional belief in the complementary nature of man and women, and its expression in marriage and family. Any group who rages than men are suckers to get married, is intrinsically opposed to the survival of our civilization in any even remotely healthy form.
Well said.
Arthur, it’s simply nonsense to claim that most anti-feminists are misogynists (unless you consider people who believe women should be held accountable for their actions and inactions are misognynists). I’ve been a f/t men’s rights activist for 15+ years and have never encountered any misogynists. I’ve encountered plenty of misandrists, both male and female. Many of the most prominent anti-feminists are women e.g. Professor Janice Fiamengo, Erin Pizzey, Bettina Arndt…
As for “the survival of our civilization” is concerned, let’s start with abortion, shall we? Feminists are its biggest fans. The forecast average number of children per woman was 2.5+ in 1967, at the time of the Abortion Act, today it’s around 1.5. Over those 57 years British women have had 10+ million unborn children killed. Globally 70+ million unborn children killed every year – WHO estimate – a genocide with no parallels in human history, and no end in sight.
MRAs explain clearly – they don’t “rage” – that marriage is very risky for men, as is having children, with family courts denying children access to their fathers on the basis of allegations which aren’t tested. If those risks were removed, the objections of MRAs would be removed.
Our last election manifesto (downloadable from our website) explores about 20 areas where the human rights of men and/or boys are assaultd by the actions an/or inactions of the state, almost always to privilege women and/or girls. Of course female privilege leads to male disadvantage, how could it be otherwise?
Off the top of my head I can think of quite a few feminist contributors on Unherd – Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock, Mary Harrington, Joan Smith, Sarah Ditum… Do you think it’s right that not even one anti-feminist is given a platform here to challenge feminism and feminists? If anyone is “unheard” it’s certainly not feminists, here or elsewhere in the media.
Mike, if you haven’t heard of Weininger, is that a sign of his irrelevance or your ignorance? Most of us haven’t heard of him either, but don’t hold that against him.
Bax claimed women had more legal rights than men in 1913, when women couldn’t vote in the UK. He was also enchanted by socialism. Well, we can all be wrong sometimes.
We don’t need to be fans of militant feminism to be grateful that our wives, mothers, sisters and daughters have the right to vote and own property.
Thanks Jeremy. I think people could get a lot from Bax’s book.
As far as the right to vote is concerned, most of the men killed and injured in WW1 didn’t have one either.