/lit/ - Literature

Take the Weiningerpill

Sex and Character argues that all people are composed of a mixture of male and female substance, and attempts to support this view scientifically. The male aspect is active, productive, conscious and moral/logical, while the female aspect is passive, unproductive, unconscious and amoral/alogical.[8] Weininger argues that emancipation is only possible for the "masculine woman", e.g. some lesbians, and that the female life is consumed with the sexual function: both with the act, as a prostitute, and the product, as a mother.[9] Woman is a "matchmaker". By contrast, the duty of the male, or the masculine aspect of personality, is to strive to become a genius, and to forgo sexuality for an abstract love of the absolute, God, which he finds within himself.[10]

A significant part of his book is about the nature of genius. Weininger argues that there is no such thing as a person who has a genius for, say, mathematics, or music, but there is only the universal genius, in whom everything exists and makes sense. He reasons that such genius is probably present in all people to some degree.[11]

In a separate chapter, Weininger, himself a Jew who had converted to Christianity in 1902, analyzes the archetypal Jew as feminine, and thus profoundly irreligious, without true individuality (soul), and without 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 feminine (or identically, "Jewish") character. By Weininger's reckoning everyone shows some femininity, and what he calls "Jewishness".[12]

Weininger's suicide in the house in Vienna, where Beethoven had died, the man he considered one of the greatest geniuses of all, made him a cause célèbre, inspired several imitation suicides, and created a lot more interest in his book. The book received glowing reviews by August Strindberg, who wrote that it had "probably solved the hardest of all problems", the "woman problem".[13] It furthermore attracted the attention of Nikolai Berdyaev, who claimed that "after Nietzsche there was nothing already in this [modern German] fleeting culture so remarkable."[14]