Otto Weininger on the character of man

experience. Nor can ‘T be an object of experience to anyone else, since I am the subject only of my own experience. So what is ‘T’, if T is beyond my experience? It is an idea. It is real only as idea. And it is real only insofar as I think it. The reality of ‘Tis my affirmation of T.

From this primal identity of the subject is derived every other identity. We have observed that we do not experience any actual identity existing anywhere, either in the material world or in our consciousness. But to communicate with one another we have to use language. And for any meaningful communication to be possible we have to suppose that we all mean the same thing by the same word and that the same word always has the same meaning. This is of course not true in fact, but it is a fiction which is necessary to all our thinking and to all communication between us which uses language. Every word we use represents a concept, and all our thinking depends on concepts. The essence of a concept is that it is an idea which always stays the same. The word or concept ‘green’ always means the same, however many shades of green may actually exist, or however many scientific, philosophic or aesthetic explanations may be given to account for greenness. The concept ‘horse’ always applies to every existing horse throughout all the changes of its life cycle, and also to all the horses that have ever lived or will ever live—and even to those mythical ones that have never lived and never will.

Words therefore, unless they are used as proper names, do not directly represent things in the actual world. For not only do these change, while the word which denotes them remains the same, but a great variety of things can be denoted by the same word. The word represents a concept which is invariable. It is true, as Weininger points out, that we humans are not able to form pure concepts. We could do this only with perfect intuition of reality and pure logical thought. Pure concepts would be a divine prerogative! We humans can only make generalisations, which psychologically represent concepts and which we treat as concepts. But the standard or ideal of the concept remains, as expressed in the proposition ‘A is A’; and this is what is important. Without this standard or ideal we would live in the world of Alice’s Humpty Dumpty, who made words mean what he wanted them to mean. Without concepts no reasoning would