Otto Weininger: godfather of the manosphere He is Judith Butler meets Bronze Age Pervert

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.

As this may suggest, Weininger had, in the year before his death, swapped Judaism for an idiosyncratic Christianity. His blend of misogyny with antisemitism characterised Judaism as “saturated with femininity”. Jewish traits, to his mind, were feminine ones: the Jews were “habitual matchmakers”, “devoid of humour but addicted to mockery”. Jews were, to Weininger’s odd mind, all basically women. Although Zionism had “brought together some of the noblest qualities of the Jews”, and appeared to represent Judaism at its most assertive, ambitious, masculine, it was doomed to failure by the fundamental fact of Jewish effeminacy. Jews ought, according to Weininger’s counsel, to convert to Christianity; but fully escaping one’s Jewishness was a difficult task, and only one man had ever managed it. Christ was born a Jew for a reason, according to Weininger; “it was his victory over Judaism that made him greater than Buddha or Confucius… Perhaps he was, and will remain, the only Jew to conquer Judaism.”

Weininger was not Christ, so he took the only other path available to him. Eckart was probably right to speculate that Weininger killed himself as a self-hating Jew. There is a certain logic to the absurdities of Sex and Character, and Weininger doggedly pursues them all to their conclusions, even to the point of death. The arguments of the book — and there can be no doubt that Weininger believed them intensely — leave him with little alternative. There may be some consistency in madness.

Sex and Character was a particularly fevered product of anxieties about a “crisis of masculinity” and “feminisation of society” that we still hear a lot about, both within and without the manosphere. However eccentric and often outright loathsome, some of his ideas left more than a trace. One would be hard-pressed to name an early-20th-century figure who wasn’t influenced by him: Freud read and critiqued the earliest draft of Sex and Character, and James Joyce drew upon it when crafting Leopold Bloom. Sex and Character is, moreover, perhaps the fullest exposition ever written of the pathologies of the self-hating Jew. It is no wonder, then, that Weininger is often taken as the perfect, parodic encapsulation of the tensions and traumas of the Vienna of his day — of a society that entered the new century with its identity confused and its confidence lost.

For all that Wittgenstein matured out of his Weininger-fandom, he never shook off his fascination. It wasn’t necessary, or even possible, to agree with Weininger, he explained to Moore, “but the greatness lies in that which we disagree”. If one were to add an enormous negation sign to the whole book, he said, one might get at an important truth. Now, I am not convinced of this either: Sex and Character would probably be as mystifying with a negation mark as without one. But it is worth reading as a historical document, because of how well it captures the neuroses of the age in which it was written. And it is worth reading for the reason that all the world’s weirdest books from bygone eras are worth reading — to grimace at the unpleasantness and foreignness that Wittgenstein warned Moore about, and then be struck by those occasional jolts of familiarity.

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Samuel Rubinstein is a writer and historian.

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