This is a spic n span summary of a tortured thinker who cast a long shadow in Vienna at the dawn of the 20th century (posted
here, originally).
During those days of ironic prosperity in Austro-Hungary, weininger identified the decay of modernity as the
'triumph of pettiness over greatness.'
"....a time when art is content with daubs and seeks its inspiration in the sports of animals; the time of a superficial anarchy, with no feeling for Justice and the State; a time of communistic ethics, of the most foolish of historical views, the materialistic interpretation of history, a time of capitalism & of marxism; a time when history, life and science are no more than political economy and technical instruction; a time when genius is supposed to be a form of madness; a time with no great artists and no great philosophers; a time w/o originality and yet with the most foolish craving for originality."
The goal of
Sex & Character (S&C) is to establish a single principle that accounts for the difference between men and women. The principle is explained in two sections: biological/psychological and logical/philosophical. Bio/psycho, Otto declares everyone to be biologically bisexual, i.e. containing male and female essences. The difference is in the proportions, which also accounts for homosexuals (womanly men or masculine women). The first part ends on a polemic against the emancipation of women:
"a woman's demand for emancipation and her qualification for it are in dirrect proportion to the amount of maleness in her." In other words, lesbians are at a higher level than most women. But letting the majority of women imitate them would be a grevious error.
The 2nd part is a discussion about the essence of
Man and
Woman - not as biological class but more similar to the Platonic Forms. Man and Woman do not exist except as a eternal archetype of Forms. Everybody is psychologically either a man or a woman. However, while a biological male may be a psychological female, the converse is impossible. All women are necessarily psychologically female.
The essence of Woman is her absorbtion in sex. In other words she is sexuality itself. Men have sexual organs, but
"the sexual organs possesses the woman." The female is persistently and exhaustively occupied with sexual issues, while the male has far more diverse issues he is preoccupied with.
Otto unleashes a theory of knowledge based on the 'henid' concept. A henid is an aspect of psychical data before it becomes a fully fleshed idea. The thought process of women consists only in henids, which explains why they assume thinking and feeling are the same thing. Women require a man, specifically a psychological male, who by definition does not think in henids but in clear and articulated ideas to articulate her ideas, to interpret her henids. That requirement accounts for the tendency of women falling in love with men who are cleverer than themselves. The principle of difference is essentially thus:
the male lives consciously while the female lives unconcsciously."
From such a theory of knowledge Otto derived ethical implications:
- --since women cannot form clear n distinct judgments, due to henids, they cannot distinguish between truth and falsehood.
- No standard of right and wrong exists. Therefore women are naturally and necessarily amoral.
- They are not even at the level of the moral sphere. If they lack the moral dimension, then they also lack the dimension of a soul.
- If there is no soul, then they lack the attribute of free will. No ego, no individual essence, no character.
Furthermore, in psychology, Otto posists 2 platonic variants of Woman: the Mother and the Prositute. All women are combinations of both variations, but always predominantly one or the other. However, since women are amoral creatures, there is no moral distinction between the two. The Mother's love for her child is equally indiscriminate as the prostitute's desire to hump every tom, dick, n harry she sees.
Both share the characteristic of the feminine: the
"instinct for match-making," the desire to see man and woman united....
The only difference between the two archetypes is the form of their obsession with sex: the Mother is obsessed with the consequence of sex, whereas the Prostitute is obsessed with the act of sex itself.
Otto continues the speculative psychology by venting poisoned bile about the Jews, claiming that the Platonic essence of the Jew is
"saturated with feminity." Like the Woman, the Jew lacks individuality, a sense of good/evil, souless. Oddly enough, christians may be flattered to learn that Otto places Jesus as the paradigm case in opposition to the Jew as the
"highest expression of the highest faith" for he
"conquered in himself Judaism, the greatest negation, and created the strongest affirmation and the most direct opposition of Judaism - Christianity."
Criticism: otto deals with essences, which themselves are problematic little entities that lack empirical content or definition. Such chimeras of philosophy deserve to be exorcised.
He is also missing an account for the historical subject, the social structure that enables roles for men and women to adopt, and as well as unbiased evidential reasoning.
The thesis the book S & C advocates is little more than self-serving for it justifies Otto's misogynism and antisemitism. The story of Otto weininger is best characterized as "what could have been" for he blew his brains out at age 23. A life intentionally cut short, Otto's claim to fame is how he ended his life for both
logical and ethical obligation to the tragic conclusion of his singular magnum opus, Sex & Character --
for he was both a Jew and a homosexual, and possibly a member of the psychologically female.
Otto Weininger's theory of sex: a critique
Re: Otto Weininger's theory of sex: a critique
Re: Otto Weininger's theory of sex: a critique
Linear Mode
