Otto Weininger on the character of man

sion of those male faculties, the world would be totally disrupted and humanity destroyed. The opposite of individual identity is the continuity of mankind, both continuity in time in the preservation of the race and continuity in the sense of the feeling of community with others. Sexuality is the physical and psychic expression of this continuity and is exactly opposed to the solitude of individual identity, or to the unproductive dryness of logic and intellect. That is why Weininger ascribes to woman a love of match-making and pairing. It is not just a desire for her sensual pleasure, for, he says, although her wish for her own sexual union may be the strongest impulse in her, that is only a special case of the desire that sexual union should take place and that children should be born. “The idea of pairing’ wrote Weininger, ‘is the only conception which has positive worth for woman. Woman is the bearer of the thought of the continuity of the species. The high value she attaches to the idea of pairing is not selfish and individual, it is super-individual. It is the transcendental function of woman. . . . Her own personal sexuality is only a special case of this universal, generalised, impersonal instinct. . . . The object of her love is that of her sympathy—the community, the blending of everything . . . She is always in relation to the general idea of the race as a whole of which she is an inseparable part, and she follows the instinct that most of all makes for community.’

From this view of the function of woman as opposite and complementary to man follows all the rest of Weininger’s critique. The being of man (M) depends only on his identity; woman (W) has no being. She has only existence. The translator of the ‘Authorised translation from the sixth German edition’, first published in 1906, seems to have misunderstood Weininger badly by translating the German word ‘Sein’ as ‘existence’ instead of ‘being’ and the words ‘ist nicht’ as “does not exist’ instead of ‘is not’. The difference is significant. Being means inner being—being for oneself, existence means outer being—being for another. Identity is being because it is being only for itself. It is true inner being. ‘All being’ wrote Weininger, ‘is moral and logical being.’ But because woman has no relation to idea, she is not. But she exists, because the human race exists; and her reality is bound up with her dependence on others. Notions of logic, of

15