WEININGER, OTTO

WEININGER, OTTO (1880–1903), Austrian writer.

Otto Weininger is a notorious figure in modern European history, largely because of his one book, Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (1903; Sex and character: An investigation of principles), a voluminous treatise that "proved" that women and Jews did not possess rational and moral selves and, therefore, neither deserved nor needed equality with Aryan men or even simple liberty. Writers and thinkers as different as Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), Karl Kraus (1874–1936), James Joyce (1882–1941), Robert von Musil (1880–1942), Elias Canetti (1905–1994), Günter Grass (b. 1927), and Germaine Greer (b. 1939) were struck, although not necessarily persuaded, by Weininger's racist and misogynist vision of the world.

Otto Weininger was born on 3 April 1880 to a Jewish family of Vienna, the second child and oldest son of Adelheid Frey (1857–1912) and Leopold Weininger (1854–1922). After graduating from high school in 1898, he enrolled in the philosophical faculty of the University of Vienna, where he attended lectures on logic, experimental psychology, pedagogy, the history of philosophy, and a wide range of scientific and medical topics. His friends remembered him as a somber and serious youth who scorned the alcoholic and lubricious pursuits of average university students and spent his free hours discussing "the most difficult philosophical subjects."

In 1900 Weininger's friend Hermann Swoboda embarked on psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who told him that all human beings were partly male and partly female, or "bisexual." Swoboda reported Freud's observation to Weininger, who, galvanized by this idea, immediately decided to write a monograph on sexuality entitled Eros und Psyche: Eine biologisch-psychologische Studie (Eros and Psyche: A biopsychological study). He eventually developed this tract, which argued that human beings were androgynous in their bodies as well as minds, into a Ph.D. dissertation under the supervision of the noted philosopher Friedrich Jodl. It was completed in 1902 and published the next year by the renowned firm of Wilhelm Braumüller as Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung.

Long before the completion of the dissertation, however, Weininger had become increasingly preoccupied with Kantian philosophy, "Jewishness," "the woman question," and the shortcomings of modern experimental psychology. A project that had begun by arguing the ambiguity of sexual difference thus became a somewhat heterogeneous text that was still organized around the notion of sexual difference but now included long and dense discussions of woman's place in the universe, the masculine character of genius, the nature of the Jew, and the contamination of modern reason, thought, and art by effeminacy. This was not as eccentric as it might seem: the meanings of femininity (and indeed, of gender itself) were at the very heart of turn-of-the-twentieth-century debates about the nature and future of civilization—to deal with the former was to deal with the latter and vice versa. Woman, Weininger concluded, was amoral, soulless and utterly and pervasively sexual; the Jew was largely similar. Man, on the other hand, was microcosmic and protean—genius, morality, and creativity were always exclusively and necessarily male. Many of these arguments were linked with (or framed in response to) contemporary scientific and medical theories of sexuality and psychology, and documented in an enormous critical apparatus.

The book attracted little notice after publication but then its author, returning deeply depressed from a holiday, killed himself in the house where Beethoven had died. This dramatic suicide boosted sales of Geschlecht und Charakter, and some of Weininger's drafts and aphorisms were hastily collected by his friends and published as Über die letzten Dinge (On last things). Reviews of Geschlecht und Charakter appeared in profusion, Weininger's life was pored over by psychiatrists, and his work was championed by Vienna's most pugnacious cultural critic, Karl Kraus. Although not a straightforward misogynist, Kraus strongly endorsed Weininger's views about the pervasive sexuality of Woman and shared his anxieties about the degeneracy of Western civilization. After World War II, however, scholars have tended to approach Geschlecht und Charakter as an encyclopedic repository of fin-de-siècle racist and misogynist thought. While some continue to focus on Weininger's own prejudices in relative isolation, most now use Geschlecht und Charakter to explore the racial and sexual anxieties that pervaded the world in which the book was written and which it sought to influence.

See alsoAnti-Semitism; Feminism; Freud, Sigmund; Vienna.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Weininger, Otto. Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles, translated by Ladislaus Löb, edited by Daniel Steuer and Laura Marcus, Bloomington, Ind., 2005. New and complete translation of Geschlect und Charakter (1903), superseding the incomplete English version of 1906.

Secondary Sources

Harrowitz, Nancy A., and Barbara Hyams, eds. Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger. Philadelphia, 1995. Collection of informative articles on Weininger, his work, and his milieu.

Janik, Allan. Essays on Wittgenstein and Weininger. Amsterdam, 1985. Pioneering essays on the importance of contextualizing Weininger.

Sengoopta, Chandak. Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna. Chicago, 2000. Emphasizes the importance of biological and medical themes in Weininger's work.

Chandak Sengoopta