Otto Weininger

Otto Weininger (April 3, 1880 - October 4, 1903) was an Austrian philosopher. In 1903, he published the book Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character). Commonly dismissed as sexist and anti-Semitic, the book gained popularity after Weininger's theatrical suicide at the age of 23.

Born in Vienna, he was a gifted student and enrolled at the philosophical faculty of the University of Vienna in 1898, receiving his doctorate in 1902.

In his book Sex and Character, Weininger argues that all people are composed of a mixture of the male and the female substance. The male aspect is positive, productive and moral, while the female aspect is negative and not capable of deep thoughts or morals. Wininger argues that emancipation should be reserved for the "masculine women", i.e. lesbians and that the female is obsessed with sex: both with the act, as a prostitute, and the product, as a mother. The duty of the male, according to Weininger, is to strive to become a genius, and to forego sexuality for an abstract love of the absolute, God, which he finds within himself.

In a separate chapter, Weininger, himself a homosexual Jew who had converted to Christianity[?] in 1902, analyzes the archetypical Jew as feminine, profoundly irreligious, without a soul and a sense of good and evil. Christianity is described as "the highest expression of the highest faith", while Judaism is called "the extreme of cowardliness". Weininger decries the decay of modern times, and attributes much of it to Jewish influences.

Weininger shot himself in the house in Vienna where Beethoven had died, the man he considered one of the greatest geniuses of all. This made him a cause célèbre, inspired several imitation suicides, and turned his book into a success. The book received glowing reviews by August Strindberg, who wrote that it had "probably solved the hardest of all problems", the "woman problem".

Ludwig Wittgenstein read the book as a schoolboy and was deeply impressed by it, later listing it as one of his influences and recommending it to friends. Indeed, Weininger's quote "Logics and ethics are fundamentally the same, they are no more than duty to oneself" could have been written by Wittgenstein. The themes of the decay of modern civilization and the duty to perfect one's genius occur repeatedly in Wittgenstein's later writings.

Further reading

• Otto Weininger: Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung, Vienna, Leipzig 1903, translation online (http://www.theabsolute.net/ottow/schareng.pdf)
• Nancy Harrowitz, Barbara Hyams (eds). Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995