Otto Weininger on the character of man

which makes them demand to be the same as men. It unfortunately also confirms his assertion that if women merely ape men outwardly they will do no more than project their femininity in a more forcible way. For the more vociferous members of the feminist movement merely aspire to compete with men in their most negative and anti-social qualities of individualistic pride, greed and ambition. They want to demonstrate that they are as good as men in intellectual pursuits, in competing for material gain and in wielding individual power. It does not seem to occur to them that what has gone wrong after so many millenia of male domination is that the unbalanced exaggeration of certain male values has distorted them towards their most negative manifestation. What is needed today is not that women should all crowd with the men on to the heavy side of the heeling ship, but that they should try to restore the balance by affirming the equal significance of those true feminine values which have been ignored in our present civilisation. If the world is left to men alone, they will destroy it; and if women merely try to imitate men, they will only help to hasten the destruction. There will be no world order, no peace or prosperity, unless women join together to demand that community and co-operation should become the ruling values in society rather than competition and confrontation. The guiding light of women should be Sophia rather than the image of the film star, the model or the successful executive. And they should demand of men that Christ and genius should be their goal rather than lavishing their admiration on the tycoon and the autocrat. And both men and women in that part of them which is truly male would do well to regard the high standard which Weininger has set for man.

Though Weininger wrote only about the positive aspect of the male principle and the negative aspect of the female principle, it would be wrong to underrate his work on that account. In Mitrinovié’s notion of Three Revelations, which has been described in several earlier lectures, he called Weininger, Nietzsche and Stirner three commentaries on the third revelation, of which he took Erich Gutkind to be the prophet. All three of them rejected the idea that morality consists in doing or not doing specific actions and that it is dictated to man by God or by any