Otto Weininger

Origins and early life

Otto Weininger was born in Vienna on 3 April 1880 into a Jewish family, the son of a goldsmith, and this fiche states plainly that he converted to Protestantism in July 1902, on the very day he received his doctorate, and that he took his own life fourteen months later.

Work and career

He is here under the rule of this site that a Jew who left Judaism remains part of its story, and his fiche is one of the hardest it contains, because it must say clearly what his book argues. Sex and Character, published in 1903 and expanded from his dissertation, sets out a theory of universal bisexuality — every human being is a mixture of male and female elements, an idea that anticipated later psychology and that Freud's circle contested with him — and then builds on it a metaphysics in which the masculine principle is form, logic, genius and moral will, and the feminine is matter, sexuality and the absence of self.

From that he derives a systematic misogyny, and a chapter on Judaism which he defines not as a people or a religion but as a mental disposition, feminine in his terms, without genius, without state, without soul, and which he attacks in language antisemites of the next forty years quoted with delight; Hitler's circle cited him. The book was written by a Jew about Jews, three months before he shot himself in the room where Beethoven had died, at twenty-three.

This fiche neither excuses nor conceals: what he wrote about women and about Jews is contemptible, and it was formative — Wittgenstein said the book had to be read, Strindberg, Joyce, Kraus and Broch all engaged with it, and historians of Vienna treat it as the clearest surviving specimen of Jewish self-hatred as a cultural phenomenon. His work on bisexuality and character also entered psychology by way of Fliess and Freud's quarrel over it.