The case of Otto Weininger: A psychiatric study

What is the mind? What is the mind of a human? What is the mind of the one who investigates the human? Can the human mind understand itself? Can a human mind understand the mind of an other? This is psychology.

The case of Otto Weininger: A psychiatric study

Postby admin » Thu May 03, 2018 8:26 pm

Part 1 of 2

The case of Otto Weininger: A psychiatric study
by Ferdinand Probst, Assistant Doctor at the Munich District
Translated from German by Google Translate
From "Border Questions of Nerve and Soul Life. Individual Representations For Made All States. In Clubs With Outstanding Professional Men at Home and Abroad, Issued by Dr. L. Loewenfeld and Dr. H. Kurella
1904

"What will be the thought that comes under the pressure of the disease? This is the question that concerns the psychologist, and here the experiment is possible. "

-- Nietzsche, Preface to the Second Edition of the "Merry Science".


"But whoever negates logic has already left her, he is on the way to madness."

-- Weininger, "About the last things".


Introduction[1] .

On October 4, 1903, the twenty-three-year-old Otto Weininger, Doctor of Philosophy, shot himself dead in Vienna. From him come two books: "Gender and character. A Principal Examination", which was published shortly before his death and "About the Last Things", which was published by his friend Moriz Rappaport as an estate in late 1903, both in Braumüller's publishing house in Vienna.

Especially "gender and character", which was supposed to be a solution to the question of women in a higher sense, has caused a general sensation; it has found a number of enthusiastic eulogists. There was no lack of lively and energetic contradiction.

Strindberg welcomed z. For example, the book with the words, "A terrible book, but probably the worst of all problems solved" and exclaims: "I spelled, but Weininger put together. Voilà un homme! [Here is a man!]"

This first work is praised "eerie unity and sparkling spirit"; its results were called "deafening, devastating." Nordhausen described the "Last Things" as the "delicious testament of the twenty-three-year-old Great," asserting that "enriched by suggestions, flashlights, and precious gold finds is not a book of our day."

In Vienna itself, the center of modern decadence, the hometown of the "philosopher", Weininger even seems to have some sort of religious community. The preface, which his friend Rappaport wrote to the "Last Things", contains the following passage: "It should be mentioned here that at the time of his funeral, a partial lunar eclipse, visible only in Vienna, took place, which ended just as his body was lowered into the earth." Only at the death of Christ and allegedly at the funeral of the philosopher Karneades did similar processes occur in nature, manifestations of supernatural beings, thus documenting the divine sympathy. The story with the white cloud at the funeral of Kant. That Rappaport it leads, is nothing like a pious design of a very ordinary occurrence; it can only be taken seriously by a mystic. After all, Weininger is also brought into parallel with Kant.

So it will not fare well to him who will dare to deny to this Savior the awe demanded of his disciples, as Moebius has already experienced, to whom Weininger's friends cannot pronounce themselves dismissive enough.
I also do not intend to exert any influence on those as well as on the wider mass of those unable to criticize, on those who astonish Weininger's thoughts and at the very least speak with a certain shy respect of the great man. Also, the few rulers have already formed their opinion. (Dr. Hirth has best pronounced in youth; Very good is also a criticism in the "supplement to the general newspaper" (No. 292, 1903) of Dr. med. Schneider), who came to the conclusion that "a not quite normal feeling in sexual and perhaps in some other respects in the author at least with high probability may be accepted." What I want to offer in the following, should only be a psychiatric study; because I consider Weininger and his books to be a highly interesting phenomenon, which probably has a permanent place in the annals of psychiatry will be. Unfortunately, I am unable to gather sufficient data from the patient record provided to me by the editor in the most amiable manner to answer the hereditary burden, leaving a regrettable gap that will be filled later. The anamnestic data derived in large part from the father Weininger, who was in bereitwilligster and zuvorkommendster way, also from Vienna and acquaintances from the biography Weininger by Rappaport. I have used the latter with some caution, since it bears an exquisitely pathological character; I have taken this from her, which is unmistakable with her own expressions and the picture Weininger fits together and that is much, much more than Weininger's father wants to believe. He considers his son a "phenomenon," a genius of the single kind, and denies Rappaport's fiercely; he will also disagree with my deductions as they cause him pain. I deeply regret it, because I personally appreciate it very much. He wanted a psychiatric consideration because he was convinced that no neurologist would be able to prove a mental disorder in his son. Since the opposite follows the expectation, of course, the psychiatric judgment will be treated contemptuously and denied me the right to speak at all in such high and sublime things. "In tyrannos" says Yench in such a case. Thus Moebius (v. Appel, Neue Bahnen 1904. IV. 214) states that it is psychologically very understandable that the Leipzig materialist Vogtscher Staining could not understand the dualist Weininger, and he is labeled a "conceptual latent sadist". Since I wanted to be critical with philosophical knowledge, as a psychiatrist I would immediately say that I do not understand eo ipso anything about philosophical thinking, so in my discussions I try to be as "home-baked" as possible, as clear and simple as possible; you can get ideas, especially Weininger's. One's own are much clearer if one omits the "philosophical cloak" that he has put on them. I also thought it best to reproduce as many passages from Weininger's books as possible, just as the medical journals are the best in which the patient's sayings are literally listed after stenographs.

The anamnesis.

Otto Weininger was born on the 3rd of April 1880 as the second child of a craftsman in Vienna. The father is a remarkably talented, educated, and versatile man, who, according to him, busied himself more with his children than he usually does. He indicates that there were no cases of mental disorder in Weininger's Ascendenz, as far back as he could remember. This is of course to take cum grano salis. Nothing is more unreliable than a hereditary anamnesis, even those made by laymen in the best faith. In any case, as a Jew, Weininger has one thing in advance, that he belongs to a tribe which, according to Charcot, "seems to have the privilege of showing everything that one can imagine of neuropathies to the highest degree."

Weininger's living siblings, four of them, are said to be mentally and physically healthy; two died of diphtheria resp. Appendicitis. Weininger came to the world without art support after a normal pregnancy. The father states that bodily development was completely normal; "You could rather count him among the stronger children. At the age of fourteen, he spoke his German in the clearest terms, but he was well-received in the house. He soon distinguished himself by intellectual precocity, but not in the sense of the wisdom of wisdom." "With fifteen months he was surely alone firmly on his feet. In elementary school he often made himself uncomfortable to the teachers by a thirst for knowledge which was far ahead of his age, and even by his activity in fields which ought to have been far from him; He also occasionally criticized the expressions of his teachers. He got good grades, mostly very good; he was rarely the first in the morality because he did not want to submit to the subjects of the discipline and to go his own way." In the years 1890-1898 he attended high school. Again, he was always one of the best in languages ​​always the best, as well as in history, literature, logic and philosophy. "And yet he disliked almost all teachers. There were even two to three times violent appearances in the school. He always did the work as he did, seldom as the teachers wanted, sometimes he did not care about teaching, but ignored him and studied his books, also writing in class, which was not at all related to the subject of the lesson." To the dread of the father, the young high school student further "showed a certain disdain for the intellectual and scientific capacity of some of his professors, and this earned him bad habits, even though he did not let "immoral" be owed neither at school nor later. He knew a great deal in French, English and Spanish." These three languages ​​were learned. Weininger with his father. He surprised him by the tremendous lightness of his conception and by his astonishing memory, although the father expressly states that he is considered quite severe and exacting. For science and mathematics Weininger had little interest in his high school years, hence less good grades; It was not until the university years that a great inclination awoke in him for these objects.

In October 1898, at the age of 18½ years, he moved to the University of Vienna; he was enrolled exclusively in Vienna.

As a child and boy should Weininger have shown no deviations in his behavior from that of his peers. "His behavior towards the classmates did not differ much from the general practice. With two or three he had more intimate intercourse in the classroom for the exchange of ideas and these were also his friends. As a boy he took part in the games of his comrades in the normal way. He only liked to isolate himself with his books. But he never disliked participation in the game at school and especially at the lower grammar school. In Obergymnasium, however, this became rarer. Until his twenty-first year, he was no different from his father and siblings from other children and young people of his age; but he made distinctions and felt more attracted to the strict.


His son always took into account the circumstances of his father, who, though well situated, lacked riches. The father says he was very frugal except for his books. He seems to have been enthusiastically attached to his father. "I destroyed a page from his last writings," writes the father, "which was to serve to glorify me." Schopenhauer's schemer. Too bad that it is destroyed. Weininger is also said to have cultivated great devotion for his eldest sister; it was only during the last ten months of his life that a departure had taken place. The father pushes it on external, foreign influences; but it will probably explain logically from the mental constitution Weininger, as will be shown later.

In the summer of 1900 Weininger expressed to his father that he wanted to convert to Christianity. At that time the father absolutely did not agree. "At that time, there was no Christian sense in my son and I thought that he wanted to convert from material interests," says the father and continues: "If I had then traces of the splendid change (!) Discovered, which he later went through, I would have been quite conciliatory with the idea, as was the case when I learned the change of religion in the summer of 1902, fifteen months before his death, and we never loved each other more than those fifteen months." On the day of his graduation, Weininger was Protestant. The father learned the transfer later. In September 1901, Weininger had left his parental home and moved into a room in the city. He then came home from meals only two or three times a week. The "splendid change" had not really taken place under the eyes of the father, and his statements about the last two years of his son's life were indeed made in good faith, but clearly subject to a definite intention and hypothetical. The father considers things impossible in the last two years just because he had not made similar observations in the previous ones.

The student Weininger seems to have made no sense for sociable traffic; the father reports: "About a year, from 20-21 Years, he did not disdain to spend an evening with one or two glasses of beer in the inn with friends, accompanied even three or four times mother or sister (because I was not available for such things) to dance treats. He was ashamed of this later, and when I described to him a few days before his death a place in his work in need of stylistic improvement, he said: "You are right, father; I wrote this when I stood low," with a direct reference to that epoch.

The father also tries to give information about the sexual life of his son; but you have to keep in mind that Weininger lived two years away from the father and that there will probably be few fathers at all, who are made by their young sons familiar with their sexual feelings. The father does not want to have any sexual abnormality on his son. He says, "I write what he told me in this regard, and at a time when he was already infused with extraordinary love of truth (!)." He believes that his son was only very late, at the age of twenty, in sexual intercourse with Women kicked and remained very moderate; nor is the father aware that the son was ever in love with a girl. "He certainly associated with very few female beings." When the father once reproached him, as he had been able to come to so devastating judgment on the woman with so little experience, the son answered, It is a great mistake to expect the correct knowledge from experience. I would rather believe that the content of the works and the words of his friend Weininger was extremely erotic by nature. Later.

Weininger used to be gentle with his subordinates. B. against servants and people from low life position; but at times angry and angry with authorities. "Hartherzigkeit and Stinginess had been foreign to him. Very interesting is the statement of the father that Weininger had been the last two years of his life "of a touching humility against all". "I called him a saint inwardly; but he was certainly very proud of his abilities, as he never let it be admitted that great men who had done great things would have been modest, at most outwardly they were." With this change to humility may well be the statement Rappaport's. In connection with this, Weininger did not offer a beggar a present without taking off his hat and walking over no meadow so as not to destroy any germ of life; Incidentally, the father denies the accuracy of this information; before the germs of life has yes Weininger, in fact, showed no respect in his works; but it is quite possible that he once did such a thing in some emotional exuberance.

Regarding the moods of his son, the father reports: "For all the depth of his thinking, until the end of his 21st year he was more cheerful than dull and only serious in his studies and listening to music. Less than a year before his death, his mind clouded over, but not exactly alarmingly, with the exception of a short time in November 1902, eleven months before his death, to which I was concerned; but it passed and became much better again, so that I expected the same course for that second crisis." Unfortunately, the father refrains from any information about the ideas that occupied the son during his melancholy upset. Rappaport, as I will immediately insert here, indicates that Weininger In the autumn of 1902, before the development of "Gender and Character", he had for some time been thinking of suicidal thoughts, and that the misfortune had been prevented at that time only by the persuasion of his friends. This statement coincides with that of the father, that probably also the other disputed messages are not out of thin air.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide is the second leading cause of death among youth aged 15 to 24 and the third leading cause of death among youth aged 10 to 14 (CDC, 2010). Among youth who identify as sexual minorities, the likelihood of death by suicide has been estimated to be two to seven times greater than the likelihood of death by suicide among heterosexual youth (Haas et al., 2011). Haas et al. suggest that such a range exists because records of death rarely include a person’s sexual orientation. More precise data exist on the prevalence of suicidal ideation among sexual minority youth, however, with twice as many reporting a desire or intent to die when compared to heterosexual youth (King et al., 2008).

-- Why Are Suicide Rates Higher Among LGBTQ Youth?, by Katherine Schreiber and Heather Hausenblas Ph.D.


In June 1903 Weininger gave up his own apartment, spent six weeks with his family in Brunn near Mödling and traveled to Italy at the end of July, where he remained until the end of September. Apparently, at the beginning of the trip, depression was already on again; on his return on the 29th of October 03 to Vienna, he was in a gloomy mood. He initially stayed in his father's house for five days, leaving on the evening of the third night to take a room in Beethoven's death house, where he ended his life.

"In these five days," says the father, "his mood was extremely depressed, but not very different from the one observed eleven months ago. My question whether he suffered physically, he denied resolutely and I think it is pure truth. I asked whether he endured any torment by external events, such as a relationship with any female being; he denied and I do not doubt for a moment the truth of his statement."

Weininger had spoken little of his work "Gender and Character" towards his father; here and there he has probably caught up with his view of one or the other question of life. The father only fully got to know the book when it came to printing and the son asked him to "give him here and there stylistic phrases that displeased the father, for correction." The first part of the book had served as a doctoral thesis; from about the end of November 1902 to the beginning of July 1903, the actual book was worked out. According to the father Weininger about 18 months (probably the first part probably included) "but worked with downright terrible diligence". He certainly had proper meals only two or three times a week, when he was eating at home; otherwise he would have taken only the essentials. He often forgot to take the dinner; it was often found untouched in the morning. He had not changed over criticisms of his work; "He smiled and disregarded them. [b]Only the charge of Moebius annoyed him". Moebius had indeed in a review of the Weininger book (in "Schmidt Yearbooks for all medicine". Augustheft 1903) deeply offended the young author by trying to prove that everything factual was already contained in his "physiological idiocy of the woman" and other of his writings, and that the Weininger book seemed like a grotesque distortion of his own utterances; even the title was copied from a title series by him. And Weininger had expressly protested against a confusion of his statements with the "homebaked" of Moebius from the outset! It offended him all the more as, of course, the work of Moebius published in 1901 had a great influence on him. Under 17. VIII. 03 Weininger wrote from Syracuse to Moebius a "long, somewhat informal letter" of the contents, Moebius must either prove what he said, or publicly revoke; he gave him three weeks to think, then he would prosecute him for malicious slander.
Moebius took the "gloved glove", as Weininger put it, in his brochure "Gender and Immodesty"[2], but his opponent did not live.

In a follow-up the father reports two very significant episodes. "A Viennese writer and keen thinker wrote to him (the son) of enthusiastic homage to the ingenious work, and since I learned not by my son but by chance and held out to him, he muttered to himself: "I have a book for the millennia written, but not yet understood". He said that in quiet humility (!). Despite the tremendous sense of self that speaks from the words. In the summer, before leaving for Italy, he also told me that it was out of the question for a woman to ever understand his book." His friends can appeal to these two statements; they are excellent evidence.

Physically, Weininger had shown nothing conspicuous; he had always been healthy, had especially a good sleep and good digestion. The biographer Rappaport tells of epileptic seizures Weininger; He wants to have seen even such attacks at Weininger; I'll be back soon. The father denies everything that might be related to epilepsy to his son; He also gives a family medical certificate that the doctor of the family is not aware of such attacks at Weininger. He believes that the circle of friends constructed epilepsy because epilepsy and genius belonged together; were also after Weininger View all founders of religion, even Luther, epileptics. The father writes: "Otto said z. To me and some friends, I think I'll become an epileptic. My astonished question came out that he usually gets a litter at night just before falling asleep, a dandruff, a thing that everyone, even a little nervous, experiences innumerable times." Not even the symptoms that "simulate" epilepsy were present.

As the cause of suicide, the father looks above all false pride; Weininger had expressed thoughts of suicide in the manner of Viennese coffeehouses, had said goodbye to his friends, and then allowed the merely ill-considered, more revered, induced statements to follow the deed, because he was ashamed to show himself to his friends again; the lack of family sense that Weininger had had contributed to his. But with this, in my opinion, the unfortunate is in fact wronged.

As far as the information of the father; they clearly show that he knows very little about his son's last two years. Here are the statements Rappaport's of great value. The father denies as I said, their correctness, but only because he has more critique of the pathological recognizes that these descriptions everywhere clearly show what must be wrong according to the father's view, because the son was only a genius, not a mental patient can be. Therefore, he also reproaches the biographer for having worked through the publication of the estate and his foreword to the people who declared everything genius insane. The charge is unjust. It is supposed to be about establishing the truth; and, in particular, the writings of Weininger from his last epoch, even if they were only "germs for later elaboration," are extremely important, as will be seen. Rappaport reports on Weininger: "Of a very tall, lean stature, without any special muscular strength, he possessed a very tenacious health. His nerves overcame all efforts, although he had much nervous in his nature, although he also had a deep understanding of neurasthenia (!). He was not neurasthenic; even to madness there was no pronounced disposition. Only (!) With severe heart attacks and with epileptic seizures, he had to suffer more often; the former always came to terms after great mental effort." Unfortunately, very few objectives can be inferred from this rather confused presentation. About the type of seizures (number, precursor, course of the same) would Rappaport probably express something more precisely; he also completely conceals when such seizures appeared for the first time; The same would probably have developed after Weininger left the parental home?

With admiration Rappaport speaks of the colossal labor, the comprehensive knowledge and interests of his friend; in a footnote of the first page he even writes with comical importance: "He (Weininger) has also dissected a brain once!"

Weininger was initially an enthusiastic supporter of the empirio-criticism of Avenarius. "He rejected the concept of God with determination. But that soon changed." The total change had been brought about by ethical problems that made Weininger followers of Kant and "in the course of two years metamorphosis into a full mystic"(Jodl).

Very interesting is what Rappaport reports on Weininger's relationship to music; this is so characteristic that it cannot be invented, not even distorted. Weininger felt in every single melody a psychic phenomenon, a landscape mood, which clearly and definitely associated with this melody, so that he of a motive of heartbeat, of a motive of willpower, of a melody of cold in the empty space could speak. These visions were by no means limited to feelings and moods; they very often rose to the sight of the highest and most general problems ..... so Weininger "felt in this motive the playing monism,
in that the resigned separation from the absolute, in a third the original sin u. s. w." The A major melody of Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite called Weininger "the greatest air dilution ever achieved. "

Somebody feel it.

For Wagner had Weininger originally no sympathy; it was still in the Avenarius period, before the transformation; he even commented rather disparagingly on Wagner. "But in the great transformation that he took part about two years before his death, that also changed tremendously." Richard Wagner became the artist for Weininger; why, I will still show. "Most of all he lyrically estimated the parzifal". According to Rappaport, the most tremendous effect exerted the love-joy motive upon him ("You alarm clock of life, victorious light"); Weininger called it "the absorption of the horizon".

After that great transformation of his personality was Weininger gradually entered into a different relationship with nature; "Everything sensuous was perceived as a symbol of a spiritual", "everything visible as the symbol of an ethical and psychic reality". "His first symbolic experience was the vision of light as the expression of morality; he concluded that the deep-sea fauna must be the incarnation of criminal principles, since it chose the stay so far from the light ..... With a strange certainty (!) there were horse and dog, cypress and violets, river and lake, Sun and stars recognized as symbols of ethics ..... It is the old doctrine of man as the microcosm, which has once again become fertile here.
" The biographer also knows of a very strong travel need Weininger to report.

In personal dealings Weininger, I heard, made many a disagreeable impression by his hasty, nervous nature and his great self-esteem over all masses. Rappaport writes: "Good-natured in the ordinary sense, d. H. tolerant of all those mean traits that contribute to the enjoyment of life, without directly harming other people, he was not; it should also be related that he was never 'comfortable'."

The following passages from August 1902 (to Arthur Gerber) bear witness to his uncomfortable sense of self: "I now have the conviction that I was born a musician. Most likely at least. Today I have discovered a specific musical fantasy that I never imagined and that touches me deeply. Respect fulfilled .... After fourteen hours of seafaring .. I am seaworthy! as I had expected from me otherwise. I believe that nothing can harm the dignity of man so much as seasickness. Significantly enough, women are all seasick."

If one wants to understand the essence of Weininger, his interpreter means that one has to understand dualism and its projection on the human psyche, the principle of opposition in consciousness. There would scarcely ever have been a man in whom dualism would have been constantly expressed in such a terrible inner struggle as in him. Under dualism Weininger understood the ethical dualism that man is partly derived from God, partly from the dust. According to Rappaport, the "doctrine" of Weininger can be described as follows: "Every human being contains something of nothing, of chaos, of the devil, of Weininger. The personified Nothing is, and something from the universe, from the cosmos, from the deity ... The genius is not a kind of lunacy or crime, but their complete overcoming, their greatest contrast." Since in Weininger these contrasts were felt very intensely, so he had to "endure a fight that might not have had its equal in intensity, in incessant highest danger"!! Weininger once said that if he were victorious, that would be the greatest victory ever achieved by a human being. This statement is absolutely genuine; it coincides with everything that emerges from Weininger's written statements.

IN BOTH DOMAINS of physical reality —within the visible and the invisible dimensions— every deed engenders also corresponding visible, as well as physically invisible effects.

The concept “deed” must here be taken to include each impulse of your will, as well as every thought you think, and every word you speak.

You will remain encumbered by the consequences of your deeds until you shall have unified the energies that form your timeless soul and, using them, have been united with your Living God.

Not until that time shall you be able to undo the consequences of your deeds, to the extent that you would have them be undone.

ETERNITIES ago you were united with your Living God, integrated as a purely spiritual being in the Spirit’s all-embracing, all-pervading life and substance.

Your active will then also had the power to effect events throughout the vast domains that constitute the unseen part of nature—an immeasurable region of the universe—and you were the established ruler of these worlds.

The spheres in which your will had power to assert itself extended from the world of purest spiritual substance to realms of ever more increasing density.

And thus you came to reach the threshold where the spheres of the invisible become so much compacted that finally they turn to matter, and thus can be perceived by physically conditioned senses.

You saw eternal Chaos wield its terrifying might—the repercussions of the absolute, unmoving, spaceless Void—and you fell victim to their wrath against all things endowed with life and being.

But never would you have been fated to succumb to their hostility, had you not earlier, intoxicated with your boundless power, turned from, and so lost your God.

Thus, deprived of your sublimest might, you now were rendered helpless.

This caused you to fall victim to destructive forces, which are compelled to be forever active in the sphere in which the Void, the absolute, eternal Nothing, manifests its domination. And here, imbued with everlasting enmity, these forces struggle to annihilate—return to Nothing—whatever penetrates into their sphere: whatever falls from the domain of purest light into the darkness of their realm....

Your timeless will had fallen from the realm of highest light and now felt driven to escape with you into the world of matter.

You had your timeless home in the domain of primal causes, yet fear drove you away, out into the world of inescapable effects....

THE HUMAN being’s fall from the domain of radiant spiritual life into the sphere subjected to the forces of eternal Nothing must not be thought of as a mythical event that happened only once and at a time beyond recall. Instead, it is a process taking place continuously throughout all eternity; just as this material universe in its unending cycles of creating and dissolving remains itself eternal as a whole, together with the Spirit’s everlasting realm; namely, as the latter’s outermost reaction and effect.

And always shall there be a few among the human beings born within the Spirit who do not succumb to that abysmal fall from light and, thus, remain united in themselves with God.

I spoke of them above as being the Elders, the Fathers of the Luminaries, who mediate eternal Light....

By no means should you see it as your goal, however, to become one of their Sons and Brothers in this life, because for that it now would be too late; given that the faculty to reach this state reveals itself within a short time after the completed fall, and only through an impulse of an individual’s free will. One then must gain experience, for thousands of years, during which one’s incarnation in a mortal body is of necessity delayed....

ALTHOUGH your fall has brought you very low, the energies from which the Godhead, without ceasing, forms Itself—rising from their lowermost, chaotic state to their sublimest self-expression— are nonetheless at work within you even now, and in a very high condition of their nature.

There also still abides in you—secretly and to your mental consciousness as yet unknown— a pure scintilla of your spiritual self-awareness: manifest within you as the guide that leads these energies and—as your conscience....

You can improve the nature of your karma, and you can make it worse; only you cannot extinguish it before you shall have unified within yourself the countless wills that now still manifest themselves chaotically within you.

Once all these wills unite themselves within the radiant light of spiritual self-awareness, which is the true and everlasting human spirit in your individuated self, then shall your Living God be born in you, out of the Spirit’s timeless substance, and then you shall at last be liberated from your karma—the causal chain that binds you to your primal deed— and you shall be a human self that has returned anew to life eternal in the Spirit.

Count yourself among the blessed if you are able to achieve this goal while you still live this life on earth.

If you do not succeed, then you shall likewise not experience inner peace even after you have laid aside your mortal form, until the day when you have found that peace within your God, conscious of your soul’s united faculties, and now become their single, all-embracing will.

However, in that other life it may be ages before you can attain that goal; for then you can no longer influence, no more improve your karma; and thus you shall most surely not perceive the Spirit’s light within you until the very last of consequences generated by your primal deed has run its course and been exhausted....

For in the Spirit’s realm of living light you cannot find your ultimate “redemption,” your “deliverance,” until the last this-worldly, earth-directed impulse that once originated in your will has finally consumed itself.

-- The Book on the Living God, by Bo Yin Ra (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken)


The great transformation included sexual abstinence. One main part of the "teaching" was that woman is an embodiment of nothingness and coitus is the most sinful thing of all. While Weininger was by nature "very erotic and very sensual, he lived in recent times completely chaste".

As already mentioned, Weininger had negated the concept of God before the transformation; but later he was "firmly convinced that the person and the motives of Jesus Christ had never understood anyone like him. The idea of ​​universal responsibility: to feel all the evil of the world as his own guilt was extremely close to him." According to Rappaport, Weininger, as a dualistic personality, was both a criminal and a saint; Weininger himself has expressed in his writings the conviction that the founder of religion, the holiest, is the culmination of genius, because he has the greatest to overcome. As in Weininger the evil that seemed to take over -- in the days of depression -- when he committed suicide, in an "act of supreme heroism." not to go to evil so as not to kill another". His desperate mood drove him traveling. Very characteristic are the letters which he wrote to his friends, and from which I shall quote the following passages (from the time of VIII-IX. 1903): "On Mount Etna, the imposing shamelessness of the crater made me think the most; a crater reminiscent of the butt of Mandrill .. For employment with Beethoven I advise you very much; he is the absolute opposite of Shakespeare and Shakespeare or Shakespeare. Similarity is something that every bigger one has to get out of and get out of ... The ruins of the old Greek theater (in Syracuse), the place where the sunset is the most enduring of all the points I know ... Are they Horsepower and the flea and the bug also created by God? You cannot and do not want to accept that. They are the symbol of something from which God has turned away ... but if the skunk and the sulfur are not created by God, then the principal objections to the bird and the tree are eliminated: these, too, are only symbols of the human, all-too-human. God cannot be stuck in any detail; for God is the good; and God creates only himself and nothing else ... All disease is ugly; it's because she's guilty ... it's much worse.

Weininger's father rightly believes that an insightful person should have given an "alarm signal" on the basis of these letters. When Weininger returned to Vienna in the last days of September 1903, he was already determined to commit suicide. The state of affairs of the poorest one is clear from the curious words of his biographer: "Lately, peeks through narrow openings into a brightly-lit distance have had the best effect on him." Over the last few days, Rappaport reports that Weininger two whole nights without interruption at the "last aphorisms" wrote; his mood had already announced the approaching catastrophe. "Total darkness broke over him; an abysmal pessimism, which he also felt guilty, took possession of him." "Everything that I have created will have to perish because it was created with evil will, except perhaps that God or good is not in any individual object Nature is included ... Maybe everything is cursed that has ever come into contact with me." Also: "My return to Vienna should have been a second incarnation." Weininger rented on 3 X 03 03 then, as already mentioned, a room in Beethoven's death house, spent the night there and killed himself in the morning of the 4th X. 03 by a shot in the chest. Moebius's words that he might once again feared for his divinity, tragically, Weininger had fulfilled himself only too quickly.

Neither the father nor the friend have ever experienced hallucinations at Weininger. From the written statements Weininger. But it turns out that he z. B. saw black dogs with firelights. In "About the Last Things" it says page 122: "The dog has a strange relationship to death. Months before the dog became a problem for me, one afternoon around five o'clock I sat in a room in the Munich inn and thought of something different and different. Suddenly, I heard a dog barking in a peculiar way and at the same moment I had a feeling someone was dying right now. For months afterwards, on the dreadful night of my life, when I was literally stricken with death, just as I was about to succumb, I heard a dog barking in a manner similar to the one in Munich; this dog barked all night; but different in these three times. I noticed, Goethe, after Faust had to conclude, must have had: several times, when I saw a black dog, a firelight seemed to accompany him. The intensity of those impressions, excitements, and thoughts was so great that I remembered my fist, picked out those passages, and understood for the first time, perhaps as the first ever, quite well."

Dog! Abominable monster! Transform him, thou Infinite Spirit! transform the reptile again into his dog-shape? in which it pleased him often at night to scamper on before me, to roll himself at the feet of the unsuspecting wanderer, and hang upon his shoulders when he fell! Transform him again into his favorite likeness, that he may crawl upon his belly in the dust before me,—that I may trample him, the outlawed, under foot! Not the first! O woe! woe which no human soul can grasp, that more than one being should sink into the depths of this misery,—that the first, in its writhing death-agony under the eyes of the Eternal Forgiver, did not expiate the guilt of all others! The misery of this single one pierces to the very marrow of my life; and thou art calmly grinning at the fate of thousands!

-- Faust, by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe


At the end of the anamnesis I want to bring the information of two Viennese guarantors, who are absolutely free of objection and reliable. Weininger earned his doctorate with the first part of "Gender and Character", which is by far the smaller and relatively sober half of the book. In the preface to the finished work, Weininger thanks Professors Jodl and Müllner for the friendly interest she has shown in his work. But now had Weininger almost a full year after completing his doctorate, he continued to work on the first part, which was reserved exclusively for the professors, and neither had seen the manuscript in its final form. A Viennese neurologist described Weininger's outward appearance as follows: "A slender young man with serious features, a somewhat veiled look, almost beautiful; I could not resist the impression of having a genial graying personality in front of me. "

The works.

The two books that form the absolutely sure and fundamental basis of the judgment of Weininger's state of mind, are "gender and character" and "about the last things". The former consists of two parts, a small introductory one, which was written at the beginning of 1902 and served as a dissertation, and a second part, which was begun in the autumn of 1902 after the first depression. "About the Last Things" contains a series of essays and fragments edited by his friend Moriz Rappaport after Weininger's death according to his testamentary order. Apart from a few pieces, the content of the book was prepared during the Italian trip. In the following, I will systematically discuss the contents, especially of the first work, and leave Weininger, since it is to be considered a kind of exploration to put forward his ideas as much as possible in his own words.

Even the subtitle of the main work, "a fundamental investigation" reveals the high self-assessment of the young author. As he himself thought about the work, his self-admonition in the "Future" of 22nd of July 1903 proves: "In this book, I believe that the psychological problem of sexual antagonism has been solved and a conclusive answer given to the so-called woman question: a completely phrase-free one." "To the last end of human knowledge (!) led exploration of the essence of the woman and the raising of the issue to a level on which the previous discussions have not moved." Of modesty will probably feel no one there.

The first part, titled "The Sexual Diversity," covers just under 93 pages of the 461-page book, with no annotations attached; it has turned from the dissertation to a biological-psychological introduction to the second part, the "sexual types." This first part is a student work full of hardships and extremes, collected like most dissertations, but very diligently worked and showing great knowledge; the influence of Moebius' recent works is quite unmistakable here. I do not want to delve into the well-known questions, to which Weininger with great erudition collected views and has spotted z. Where sexuality is in the body; it does not depend on what the knowledge, opinions and conclusions of others in the book go along with and blinds some, but on the conclusions that Weininger himself draws; if the conclusions one draws from his thinking are pathological, then all the accumulated knowledge of the author does not help. What comes out, if you peel the Own Weiningers, I want to show now.

There are, according to Weininger, a set of certain qualities which are purely male; these are all the big, good, powerful ones, properties; if these are united, then the ideal, albeit only hypothetical, man (absolute M) arises, which consists of nothing but + qualities; Unfortunately, this is not the case, because even the highest-potentialized man is always accompanied by some minuscule qualities; In fact, the Plus properties are juxtaposed with a series that could be described as having minus properties and whose pure sum would be the absolute woman (W). Since it's after Weininger. If the two ideal poles do not exist, then each human being is composed of male and female qualities, thus actually declaring the realm of sexual intermediate stages the norm. Depending on the preponderance of the M -- or W -- components one is what one understands by the common concept of man and woman. Every individual has as much W as M is broken and seeks to supplement the missing with another kind of being by a kind of mysterious affinity according to mathematical principles, so that the sum of 1 M + 1 W arises in the union. The discovery of the great law according to which the sexes dress is found, proclaims Weininger. That Schopenhauer already made all this brief and reasonable did not make any discovery of the discovery; Schopenhauer only "guessed" this great law, and the discoverer did not want to see this idea of Schopenhauer until his book was finished. Of course, if not directly invented, at least a delusion of memory, as Moebius quite rightly assumes; Weininger had just read a lot together and in the best case no longer knew whether there was any memory or thought of his own. I will point out several such things in Weininger, where the origin of his ideas can be clarified in spite of the distortion that has been given to the original, alien thought.

The main error of the Weiningerian system is that it accepts something as a fact, which it first has to prove, and then, starting from false premises, comes to the most daring conclusions; and that, as Moebius says, "he seeks to attain objective knowledge by generalizing without regard to experience and by unconditionally declaring that which is conditional." What the scientist seeks to accomplish in laborious endeavor is the starting point for him; What would have been substantiated, if at all possible, he assumes, without proof or proof, as something fixed, not as a result of some kind of intuition or inspiration, but because, as we shall see, the assumption of everything adopted earlier for miles away and from which a wealth can be drawn at the first glance of startling conclusions. What Weininger says in his foreword to the 1st edition fully confirms this view, which derives from the content of the text. Here he notes: "Not as many individual traits as possible should be strung together, not the results of previous scientific measurements and experiments put together, but the reduction of all opposition between man and woman to a single principle should be attempted. This makes it different from all other books of this kind ..." Already here it is indicated, though unclear, that an aprioristic assumption, and indeed one of the utmost importance, forms the leitmotif of the whole work. It is obvious that the only principle on which Weininger. All the contrasts of man and woman attributed to him already established, before he went to the execution of the work. This becomes even clearer by a remark at a later point in the foreword, in which he endeavors to present as the goal of his work something far beyond the characterization of gender differences. "Should it embarrassingly affect the philosophical reader," it is said, "that the treatment of the last and highest questions seems to be at the service of a special problem of not great dignity: I share with him the unpleasantness of this sensation. But may I say that quite the individual problem of gender opposition here more the starting point as the goal of deeper penetration." That is at least clear; what constitutes "the goal of deeper penetration" will be revealed soon.

But now again to the content of "gender and character". Weininger conceives the whole field of sexuality like a kit; Everything can be constructed in the simplest way; every sexual question can be answered with the magic key of the Weininger solve doctrine: homosexuality, genius, women's issues; as easy as possible. "The law of sexual attraction also contains the long-sought theory of contrarian sexual sensation." If a man has sexual affection for members of his own sex, then he has a relatively high sum of W in himself; he is thus attracted to M in seeking his complement; Homosexuality in women, Amor lesbicus, is, of course, an "outflow of her masculinity"; but since this is the "condition of its rising", one can, from the false premise that M and are well identical, think the implication; Here comes the first big nonsense: the homosexual woman is above the normal sexual: that is of course a logical consequence.

Periodically, according to Weininger, at certain times there seems to be a proliferation of those hybrid creatures hovering close to the borders where M and W flow into each other; on these z. At the time of the flood, the gypsy and women's emancipation are reduced; both are parallel phenomena, springing from the same cause! As far as the need for emancipation and the capacity for emancipation of a woman are concerned, they lie "only in the proportion of M that she has .... Only the more advanced sexual intermediate stages, which are just counted among the women, come from those women of the past and present, which are always cited by male and female pioneers of the emancipation efforts as proof of great accomplishments of the woman." As for the emancipated women, "it is only the man in them who wants to emancipate themselves." The woman question is therefore supreme simply solved, that there is no such question at all; the actual woman is absolutely incapable of any emancipation; it is even their greatest enemy.

With that, we are already beyond the first part of "gender and character" and are now heading into the wild sea of ​​the most glaring assertions and the wildest nonsense. First, the differences between M and W are thoroughly determined; how W has to get away from this is already proven from the outset.

"The woman is perpetual, the man only intermittently sexual." "The man has the same psychic content as the woman in articulated form; where she thinks more or less in Heniden, there he already thinks in clear, distinct ideas, to which one expresses oneself and always makes the secretion of things permeating feelings. In W, thinking and feeling are one (= Henide), undivided, for M they are to be distinguished. So W has many experiences in henid ​​form, when at M has long been clarified. Therefore W is sentimental and knows the woman only the emotion, not the shock. So the man lives consciously, the woman unconsciously."

Here should be a short remark in the place. Under Henide Weininger understands the merging of thinking and feeling into one, but in the broader sense the undeveloped, primitive psychic data. According to Weininger, it is in the concept of Henide that she cannot be described in more detail; Nevertheless, he gives a number of characters of the same. "It is different from the articulated content d. H. the developed idea due to the lesser degree of awareness, the lack of relief, the merging of foil and the main thing, the lack of a focus in the field of view." I do not want to elaborate here on Weininger's theory of henning. I shall not hesitate to examine to what extent the differences in the representation of men and women which he asserts correspond to the actual circumstances, but merely to highlight the jugglery art which he has at the end of his life.

Discussions on male and female consciousness.

While the keen logician first gives the woman, with thinking in Heniden, only a less keen mind, he immediately declares consciousness to him. If Weininger were psychologically uneducated, one could attribute this claim to a lack of a correct idea about the phenomenon of consciousness. However, he was sufficiently psychologically trained to know what to mean by conscious and unconscious scientific understanding, and so his claim is characterized as a nonsense, which he simply did not shy away from, because he attached it as a starting point for other similar monstrous constellations serve seemed appropriate.

Having penetrated to the knowledge of woman's unconsciousness, Weininger inserted a great chapter on the nature of genius. He immediately places himself in the proper light as the final loosener of this difficult question, proclaiming, with his own modesty: "All previous discussions on the nature of genius are either of biological-clinical nature and explain, with ridiculous conjecture, the little knowledge in this area to answer the most difficult and deepest psychological questions for sufficient. Or they descend from the height of a metaphysical point of view to incorporate genius into their system." Weininger gives the solution as expected from what has been developed: "The ingenious consciousness is farthest from the Henid stage; it has the greatest, brightest clarity and brightness. Genius reveals itself here already as a kind of higher masculinity and therefore W cannot be ingenious. Of course, W is also not able to understand the genius even remotely. For women, the ingenious is considered ingenious, Nietzsche as the type of genius. And yet, whatever juggles with his ideas, all Frenchman of spirit with true spiritual height has not the farthest kinship." One already sees clearly that Weininger considered himself the genius par excellence when he wrote that chapter, according to the logical conclusion, which also results from his own words, that no woman would ever be able to understand him.

Furthermore, W "has only one class of memories: they are those related to sex drive and procreation." "Since the woman is without continuity, it cannot be pious either; in fact, piety is a thoroughly male virtue." "So, whether a person has a relationship to his past or not at all is extremely intimately related, whether he feels a need for immortality, or whether he has the thought of death will be indifferent." It follows: "The women's need for immortality comes from." Now it is already in mystical realm. Note the type of logical construction in the following sentences; it is quite typical of the whole kind Weininger thinking; in the chapter "Gift and Memory" it says: "Value is thus the timeless; and vice versa: a thing has more value, the less it is function of time, the less it changes with time. In everything in the world, so to speak, it radiates only so much value, as it is timeless; only timeless things are considered positive. This, I believe, is not yet the deepest and most general definition of value, and not total exhaustion, but the first special law of all value theory." Well, "the deeds of Genius live eternally; Time does not change anything about them." Genius, however, is the most potentized masculinity, so it is proven that M is timeless, eternal. This is quite casual; for W of course the opposite.

In the next chapter, "Memory, Logic, Ethics," our pocket-artist of logic does not stand to explain: "The woman embittered the imposition to make her thinking dependent on the logic without exception. You lack the intellectual conscience. One could speak of "logical insanity" with her. "Further, in the case of the woman one cannot speak of anti-immoral but only of amoral being. The woman is amoral."
Like the pernicious chaos of H. St. Chamberlain, where this juxtaposition is found. In the 11th chapter "Male and Female Psychology" Weininger goes with "iron unity," as one of his worshipers wrote, to the ultimate consequences. "What this is about is coming soon. It has been found that the logical and ethical phenomena, both in the concept of truth to the highest values, combine to compel the acceptance of an intelligible ego or soul as a being of supreme hyperempirical reality. In a being who, like W, lacks the logical and ethical phenomenon, the reason for making that assumption also disappears. The perfectly feminine being knows neither the logical nor the moral imperative, and the word law, the word duty, duty to oneself, is the word that sounds the strangest to him. The conclusion is perfectly justified that he also lacks the psychic personality. The absolute woman has no ego, no soul! But Weininger makes no exact difference and throws these concepts into confusion over and over again, which among other things also from a later passage over the gender equality of both genders is clear. It is solemnly proclaimed: "Woman can never become a man ... while there are anatomically men who are psychologically women, there are no persons who are physically feminine and yet mentally men." Consistent with Weininger's theory, one would have to believe that it should be like that; but he just cannot use math here.
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Re: The case of Otto Weininger: A psychiatric study

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Part 2 of 2

The compassion of the woman is referred to the realm of the fable. The proof that compassion is not a feminine virtue is most simple: "In the old woman, there is never any more a spark of that alleged goodness, and thus the old age provides the woman with indirect proof, as all her compassion only one form sexual fusion was, even if it referred to a same-sex being." But it gets even better. "The absolute proof of the shamelessness of women is that women undresses each other, while men always seek to cover their nudity with each other ... The single man is not interested in the nakedness of the second man, while every woman always undresses the other woman in thought and then proves thereby the general interindividual shamelessness of sex." The twenty-year-old "Grosse" must have had peculiar intercourse; Surely these claims will only be able to be recaptured by the most unrighteous of his admirers. But here, too, the most transparent way of showing how Weininger thinks; In order to be able to infer the general shamelessness of the women (NB! not the absolute W), he has to make the claim proven that the women are unabashedly exposed to each other while the men are not.

In a big chapter, "Maternity and Prostitution," Weininger also destroys the last thing a "homebound" person could claim to defend a woman: motherhood and maternal love, and, logically enough, logically based on his false assumptions. He absolutely arbitrarily adjusted himself to arrive at the mystical goals, which are now gradually revealed. The women fall into Weininger in two classes: whores and mothers; the plant is organically present in every woman from birth. Here is an anthology of the following in the chapter that Moebius calls disgusting assertions and conclusions:

"In fact, I must call the general view, which I have long shared, completely wrong, the view that the woman is monogamous and the man is polygamous. The reverse is the case." Better, it must be the case, otherwise it would not fit into the bill. "For women, adultery is a tickling game in which the idea of ​​morality does not speak at all, only the motives of safety and reputation. There is no woman who in thought would never have been unfaithful to her husband, without this being the object of reproaching herself. For the woman enters the marriage trembling and full of unconscious greed and breaks it, since it has no ego detached from temporality, as expectantly and thoughtlessly as it has closed it." "The relationship of the mother to the child is for all eternity a system knee-jerk connections ..... a never-interrupted line between the mother and everything ever connected to her by an umbilical cord: that is the nature of motherhood and therefore I cannot tune into the general admiration of maternal love, but must find it reprehensible to her, which is so often praised by her, her indiscriminateness." He then makes the supreme with the words: "Their position outside the genre places the hetaeras in a certain relationship over the mother, as far as ethical where there are two wives."(!) "Only such men are attracted to the mother, who has no need for intellectual productivity. Important people have always loved only prostitutes." In a later chapter it says: "Infinitely in the women's movement is only a transition from motherhood to prostitution; as a whole, it is more a proclamation of a prostitute than a woman's emancipation, and certainly, according to its real results, a more courageous emergence of the kocotte-like element in woman." Further: "The sensations of coitus are, in principle, no other sensations than those otherwise known to woman; they show them only in the highest intensification; the whole being of the woman reveals itself in K., highly potentiated." "He lies or has never known what love is, who claims to love a woman he desires: love and sex drive are so different. That is why it is almost always perceived as hypocrisy when one speaks of love in marriage." "I would even say that there is only platonic love. Because what else is called love belongs in the realm of sows."(!) One will already notice now, what the matter is. In the chapter titled "Erotic and Aesthetics", of course, the woman is denied any sense of aesthetics. "The woman has no free will and so may not be given the ability to project beauty into the room. But that also says that the woman cannot love."

Despite the fact that Weininger has taken the free will of the woman, the first legal presupposition, he stresses three pages later with touching naivety: "The legal equality of man and woman. One can very well ask a woman without believing in moral and intellectual equality. Rather, without any contradiction at the same time, every barbarism of the male against the female sex may be condemned, and yet the most immense cosmic antithesis and essential difference need not be misjudged. For the deepest man stands still infinitely high above the highest woman." Where does the logic remain? The Weininger female being is forensically absolutely incompetent; a free determination of the will is totally excluded; You would have to impose Kuratel [custody; custodial care; tutelage; guardianship] on all women as quickly as possible. Just think of such a woman after Weininger as a witness; how is one to take them as equals, if they represent "the profound mendacity", but only far behind the deepest man comes? A woman with a strong W-content would be a complete idiot. If Weininger had been consistent, he would have had to banish the female sex without exception from the courtroom.

In order to go beyond the real purpose of feminine being, Weininger, in a chapter entitled "The Essence of the Woman and His Position in the Universe," must proceed from a phenomenon which, old and well-known, has nowhere, never one Attention or worthy of appreciation. It is the phenomenon of coupling, which allows the most complete, the deepest insight into the nature of woman. "The need itself k ....[3] to become, is indeed the strongest need of the woman, but it is only a special case of her deepest, her only vital interest, which goes after the K, in general, of the desire that as much as possible from whom, wherever, whenever k ...... become." "With married people (men) is so rarely committed adultery, because this already satisfies the idea, which lies in the coupling." "There is absolutely nothing else than the positive general feminine characterization as the coupling, that is the activity in the service of the idea of ​​K ...... at all." The system evolves, as you can see. "If femininity is coupling (and the philosopher has just proved that), then femininity is universal sexuality. Sexual intercourse is the highest value of women; he seeks to realize him always and everywhere." Thus, the woman receives existence and meaning only by the man becomes sexual. This fixes the position of the woman in the universe; it is merely the embodiment of the general sexuality that follows.

Weininger immorality is.

"A truly significant person in sexual intercourse he sees more than an animal, swine, disgusting act, or even in him the deepest, most sacred mystery deified, it will, there can never be," he exclaims. Accordingly, he can z. For example, Wilhelm Bölsche does not speak contemptuously enough: "The great union of natural selection and natural selection, whose ignominious apostle calls himself Wilhelm Bölsche," writes Weininger once. With such absolute certainty he preaches his doctrine that he can ascend to the assertion: "It is clear that if even a single, very feminine being were inwardly asexual or genuinely in relation to the idea of ​​moral intrinsic value, all that was. Here the woman was said to immediately immediately lose her general validity as a psychic characteristic of her sex." "The absolute woman, lacking individuality and will, having no part in value and in love, is of the higher transcendent, metaphysical being locked out. The intelligible, hyperempirical existence of the man is sublime over matter, space and time; in him mortal is enough, but also immortal. And he has the opportunity to choose between the two: between that life, that passes with death and that for which it first signifies a manufacture in wholly pure." "The man has in himself the possibility of the absolute something (= God) and the absolute nothing ... The woman does not sin; for even sin is a possibility in man. The pure man is the image of God, of the absolute something, the woman, even the woman in the man, is the symbol of nothingness: that is the meaning of woman in the universe, and thus man and woman complement each other." "The women have no existence and no essence; they are not, they are nothing. One is a man or one is a woman, depending on who one is or nothing." "Woman is not a microcosm; it did not arise according to the image of the deity. So is it still human? Or is it animal? Or plant?" Of course, I cannot to make me long for this nonsense; These sentences speak well for themselves. But I can not spare the reader to wade with me through this flood of nonsense; because only then does the whole system develop Weininger clear. I have been several times to put the quill down because I was sorry for my time; only the thought, maybe something to use, let me continue then. Moebius says that in the 13th chapter, "nausea has triumphed over his good will." One will be able to empathize with this; who cannot, that is probably not to help. After this little break, I want to continue to work.

Weininger proclaims thus: The woman has no soul. "Perhaps the man at the incarnation through a metaphysical, except the act of the act of keeping the divine, the soul, to oneself?" Now comes the fat end. The woman, the incarnation of evil, is a consequence of the male desire for the K ...., hence a guilt of the man; the woman must therefore be redeemed. All that Weininger said so far was only the introduction to the main point, the Redeemer's idea of ​​the woman. Weininger as the Redeemer! "Therefore, this book is the greatest honor that has ever been shown to women." It is, however, quite difficult to save the poor woman now, after it has been so deeply overthrown; one should even believe, as an incarnation of nothingness, if it were not mutable; but that only seems so; a sleight of hand artifice and then a little logic and the thing is done; one hears: "The woman is nothing and therefore, only because of that, can it become everything; while the man can only ever become what he is." And now to salvation:

"The curse that we suspected in the womb is the man's evil will. When the man became sexual, he created the woman. The fact that the woman is there means nothing else than that the man was affirmed by sex. The man has created the woman and always succeeds in it, as long as he is still sexual .... By referring to intercourse. He does not renounce, he exclaims the woman. The woman is the guilt of the man." From this then the logical achievement: "If woman is guilty and femininity means domination, it is only because all guilt seeks to multiply on its own." The summit of the system has now increased: "The man cannot solve the ethical problem for his person if he negates in the woman the idea of ​​humanity again and again, by using it as a stimulant ... The woman must internally and truly renounce sexual intercourse of her own free will. This means, however, that the woman must perish as such, and there is no possibility for an erection of the kingdom of God on earth (!), Before this does not happen .... Hereby first, on the highest aspect of the problem of women as a problem of mankind is the requirement of abstinence for both sexes wholly justified." That is the core of Poodle. Should one dare to express the fear that, in general total abstinence from sexual intercourse, humanity would have to cease to exist, the bearer of the new salvation replies with contempt: "In this peculiar apprehension of what the most terrible thought seems to be that the genus could become extinct, (Weininger's doctrine) he would not fear bodily death and do not seek for the lack of faith in eternal life the miserable surrogate in the certainty of the continuation of the species."

By the way, Weininger is not as cruel as it might seem at first sight; Ordinary man might think that with the cessation of the human species an infinite series of coming individuals would be destroyed; that is wrong; in fact, not a single individuality is destroyed by universal sexual abstinence. Weininger reveals in the "last things" the existence of the soul before birth. The following sayings will suffice: "One loves his physical parents; This is probably an indication that they have been chosen." "The birth is a cowardice: Linking with other people, because you do not have the courage to yourself. That is why one seeks protection in the womb." "From our state before birth perhaps no memory is possible because we have sunk so low through birth: we have lost consciousness and need to be born completely instinctively, without rational decision and without Knowledge and therefore we know nothing of this past." "If man had not lost himself at birth, he would not have to seek and find himself again."

This would represent the system of Weininger's "philosophy". I have skipped a chapter in the main work until now, the chapter on Judaism. Moebius says it might as well have stayed away. For the assessment of the case, however, I consider this chapter particularly valuable; Moebius knew at the time when he wrote about the book, too little data and especially the "last things" and the end of the author not, otherwise he would probably have seen in the chapter significant pointers. It is a perfect proof of why he, Weininger, is a new Messiah, in this chapter. Also you can prove in this chapter as well as hardly the original source. H. St. Chamberlain, in his Fundamentals of the Nineteenth Century ( Bruckmann , Munich, 1900), devotes much attention to the nature of the Jews and Christians; the relevant chapters (especially Vol. I, 206-458) had a tremendous influence on Weininger; Only Weininger has reconstructed and disfigured Chamberlain's excellent remarks on Judaism and on Christ for his own system. Chamberlain says that Christ is the conqueror of Judaism, that he has become lord of the old Adam by a mighty conversion of the will. It is called z. B. I, 206: "But that conversion of the will, that entry into the hidden kingdom of God, that of being born again, which is the sum of Christ example, requires, without further ado, a complete reversal of sensations." Further: "The appearance of Christ on earth has divided humanity into two classes. She first created the true nobility and indeed true birth aristocracy; for only one who is chosen can be a Christian." The following words of Chamberlain, which perhaps even directly influenced the idea of ​​conversion at Weininger, may have had a great influence on Weininger when he had not yet entered into the splendid transformation. "It would be pointless, an Israelite of genuine descent, who had managed to throw off the fetters of Ezra and Nehemiah, in whose head the laws of Moses and in whose heart the contempt of others no longer finds a place to call a Jew" (I. 458). Because according to Paul, only that is a Jew, which is hidden inside. But Chamberlain is also pretty much the only one of the living, to whom Weininger seems to pay unconditional respect, with the exception of Ibsen and the Viennese neurologists Freud and Breuer. At least Weininger once gives a gruesome treatise on hysteria, where, in a manner analogous to that of Judaism, he reflects Freud's views disguised in a truly comical way, drawing attention to a few errors with indulgence.

But now to Weininger's Chapter of Judaism. "Judaism can only be regarded as one mentality, a psychic constitution, which constitutes a possibility for all men and has found only the most grandiose realization in historical Judaism. That this is so, is proved by nothing else than by anti-Semitism ... In the aggressive anti-Semites you will always perceive even certain Jewish characteristics ... How to love the other, what you would like to be whole and yet never quite. So in the other one you only hate what you never want to be and still are, in part, still. So it explains itself that the most powerful anti-Semites are to be found among the Jews." These basic sentences are set up as facts; if they are proven, the boldest conclusions can be made. The old game,

Weininger is himself the harshest anti-Semite. Both the true Jew and the real woman both live only in the species, not as individualities. This explains why the family (as a biological, not as a legal complex) did not play such a large role in any people in the world as in the case of the Jews; the family in this sense is of feminine, maternal origin [4] and has nothing to do with the state, with the formation of society. The togetherness of Family members only as a result of the common atmosphere is closest to the Jews. To every Indo-European man, always more gifted than the mediocre, but also the most ordinary, it is peculiar that he never quite agrees with his father: because each one has an albeit subtle, unconscious or conscious anger on the man who, without asking him, feels compelled to live on him ... " Further: the Jew is thus not only the deepest in the family, but he is also "always more lustful, horny, if odd, in connection with his not actual antimoral nature, sexually less potent than the Aryan man. Only Jews are real matchmakers." Of course: coupling = W = nothing = Jew, from which the analogy to the woman is made; "The absolute Jew is soulless.[5]." Now the contrast is intoned: "The Jew, however, who had overcome, the Jew, who had become a Christian, but also had the full right to be taken by the Aryan as an individual and not to be judged by a race, about him. His moral endeavor would have long since been raised." And further: "That incomprehensible possibility of the complete rebirth of a man who has lived as a bad man all the years and days of his former life, this high mystery is realized in those six or seven people who are the great Religions of the people have founded. In this way they divorce themselves from the genius itself: In this one, the plant for the better prevails from birth. All genius is only the highest freedom from the law of nature. If this is the case then the founder of religion is the most ingenious person. Because he has overcome the most." Weininger, formerly the evil man, becomes an overcomer and teaches a new religion. Those who still do not believe that may be struck at the next statements: "Christ is the man who overcomes the strongest negation, Judaism, and thus creates the strongest position, Christianity, as opposed to Judaism." Weininger has also overcome Judaism and, in addition, the even stronger negation, the woman. The fact that the Jews are really men after all forms the horse's foot in the deduction; but they are an exception to W only in that they are "well conceptualized". Of course Weininger, as he puts it, cannot talk to Chamberlain to believe that the birth of the Savior in Palestine could be mere coincidence (NB, but Chamberlain claims that not at all cf. B. Foundations I, 249).

But where is the people, which, awakened by Christ to life, has gained for itself the precious right -- of calling Christ its own? Certainly not in Judea!...

Only one assertion can therefore be made on a sound historical basis: in that whole region there was only one single pure race, a race which by painfully scrupulous measures protected itself from all mingling with other nations -- the Jewish; that Jesus Christ did not belong to it can be regarded as certain. Every further statement is hypothetical.

-- The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century -- Volumes 1 & 2, by Houston Stewart Chamberlain


"Christ was a Jew," explains Weininger, "but only to overcome Judaism most completely; for he who has triumphed over the mightiest doubt is the most faithful, who rose above the most desolate negation, the most positive supporter. Christ is the greatest man because he has measured himself against the greatest adversary. Perhaps he is and will remain the only Jew to succeed in this victory over Judaism: the first Jew would be the last to become a Christian altogether; Perhaps, even today, there is still the possibility in Judaism to bring forth the Christian; Perhaps even the next founder of religion will have to go through Judaism again."(!) Weininger expressly points then point out that "our time is not only the most Jewish, but also the most womanish of all time," and then declares: "Against the new Judaism (!) a new Christianity is pushing to the light; humanity is waiting for the new religion founder and the struggle pushes for decision as in the first one." Commentary is superfluous.

It was in these surroundings that Christ grew up; beyond them He never stepped. Thanks to this peculiar historical sense of the Jews He awoke to consciousness as far as possible from the all-embracing Aryan cult of nature and its confession tat-tvam-asi (that thou art also), in the focus of real anthropomorphism, where all creation was but for man, and all men but for this one chosen people, that is, He awoke in the direct presence of God and Divine Providence. He found here what He would have found nowhere else in the world: a complete scaffolding ready for Him, within which His entirely new conception of God and of religion could be built up. After Jesus had lived, nothing remained of the genuinely Jewish idea; now that the temple was built the scaffolding could be removed. But it had served its purpose, and the building would have been unthinkable without it. The God to whom we pray to give us our daily bread could only be thought of where a God had promised to man the things of this world; men could only pray for forgiveness of sins to Him who had issued definite commandments. -- I almost fear, however, that if I here enter into details I may be misunderstood; it is enough if I have succeeded in giving a general conception of the very peculiar atmosphere of Judea, for that will enable us to discern that this most ideal religion would not possess the same life-power if it had not been built upon the most real, the most materialistic -- yes, assuredly the most materialistic -- religion in the world. It is this and not its supposed higher religiosity that has made Judaism a religious power of world-wide importance.

-- The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century -- Volumes 1 & 2, by Houston Stewart Chamberlain


It is also connected with his idea of ​​salvation that his attitude to Wagner changed so thoroughly; Weininger saw in Wagner's Parzifal, which he therefore also called "the deepest seal of the world literature", Christ and his own person.

How was it that Wagner was able to find the right mood for his Parsifal? It is most important for us to recognize that Wagner was able to do this because he knew that what happened on Golgotha had especially to do with the blood, he knew that we had to see there not only the death of the Saviour but we had to see what took place there with the blood, how the blood was purified on Golgotha and became something quite different from ordinary blood. Wagner has spoken of the connection of the Saviour's blood with the whole of mankind. In his book “Paganism and Christianity” we read these words: “Having found that the capacity for conscious suffering is a capacity peculiar to the blood of the so-called white race, we must now go on to recognize in the blood of the Saviour the very epitome, as it were, of voluntary conscious suffering that pours itself out as divine compassion for the whole human race.”

And in another place Wagner says: “Because His will to save was so tremendously strong, the blood in the wine of the Saviour was able to be poured out for the redemption of all mankind when even the noblest races among men were falling into decay — poured out for their salvation, as divine sublimation, the blood that is associated with family or species.” The Saviour having come from a mingling of many different peoples, His blood was the symbol of compassion and blood in purified form.

Hardly has anyone even come so near to this mystery as Wagner did. It is indeed the power with which he approaches this mystery that constitutes his greatness as an artist. We must not think of him merely as a musician, but as one who possesses deep knowledge and understanding and whose desire it is to resuscitate for the people of modern times the mysteries of the Holy Grail. Before Wagner wrote his Parsifal little was known in Germany of the mysteries and of the characters of whom he tells.

-- Parsifal: Notes From a Lecture Given by Dr. Rudolf Steiner at Landin


The material collected so far is sufficient to answer the main question whether Weininger was mentally ill and of what kind this mental disorder was. Thus, exploration could, in a sense, be declared completed. Even so, the investigation would not be complete unless it touched on some other areas. Therefore I want to explain by Citate from Weininger's writings the state of his other knowledge and views, and finally to show at the end the Elaborate of his last days, which will probably make no reasonable doubt that they come from any mentally healthy.

As in all things, Weininger is also gifted in literature with a very sharp judgment. Next to the text of Wagner's "Parzifal" he has the highest Ibsen's "Peer Gynt". Why, you can imagine. "It's a salvation drama, the biggest one, just to say it right away. Deeper and more all-encompassing than any of Shakespeare's dramas, without remaining behind them in beauty, superior in sensual beauty to all other works of Ibsen, it is of equal significance to the conception, to violence far beyond Goethe's "Faust," and almost to the Heights of "Tristan" and "Parzifal" by Wagner." Hanslick once said ("From my life" 1894, II, 234) that in fifty years the writings of the Wagnerians as monuments of one will be amazed by the mental epidemic. As far as I can remember, hardly anyone has gone to such a height as Weininger. According to him, "Wagner is the person with the greatest sense of nature ever possessed by a human being. Held against his "Rhine gold", even Goethe's songs fade from all water in fog, clouds and river ... " Wagner's poetry (NB not music) is "the deepest conception of the greatest poetry in the world. These are the most formidable problems an artist has ever set himself to reproach, even more so than the problems of Aeschylus and Dante, Goethe, Ibsen and Dostoyevsky, in order to keep silent about the problems of Shakespeare ... Wagner puts all this above Goethe, whose last word is only that of the "eternal feminine," the redemption of man by woman." One will probably notice why Goethe and Shakespeare apply so little to Weininger. Elsewhere ("Gender and Character" 408/409) the following is said about Wagner: "Richard Wagner, the deepest anti-Semite, is not exonerated by an accessory of Judaism himself in his art, as certainly as he is next to Michelangelo. The greatest artist of all time is as likely as he almost represents the artist in humanity. To him, Judaism was the great help to reach the clear knowledge and affirmation of the other pole, to win through to Siegfried and Parzifal and to give the highest expression to Germanism, which it has probably ever found in history. "

Heine, of course, misses almost any size, but only because he is Jewish. Keller and Storm are also called "idiots of every size". For Weininger, the poor Schiller is quite unbecoming; he belongs to the Jews and is simply annihilated in a small essay in the "Last Things": "What is it that offends those poems? It's the hurting thing about Schille rat all; it is his joy in the choir, in the hearth; his very ingenuous feeling of happiness, to live precisely in the time in which he lived ... He is also the real creator of the Aestheticism, which counts the most followers among the modern Jews: it flees from all depth or feigns depth to the appearance. I can call him a journalist ... but what finally makes him a journalist is his sentimentality, which chatters about a tragic event when a person is run over in the street; and above all it is that commitment to the day and the hour, that philistinism that feels most cosmically attuned when a change of the century takes place. In Schiller journalistic modernity only hates itself."
And Moebius had dared to advise Weininger to write feature articles! you understands the friends of Ingrimm so utter misunderstanding. Spinoza, as a Jew, is also "vastly overrated". The English philosophers are all flat-headed, of course "because from England soulless psychology has come"; "It does not take much to be the greatest English philosopher; but Hume does not have the first claim to this name either."

Very nice are also the teachings we receive about Nietzsche. "Nietzsche was a long seeker; Only as Zarathustra did he turn the priest's cloak about, and now those speeches descended from the mountain, which testify to how much certainty he had gained through his transformation." One sees that Weininger did not possess much criticism; Here he runs with the herd so much hated by him. The overall verdict of the young man on Nietzsche should also shed new light on his cause of death: "Nietzsche was not big enough to be able to grow independently in his own right to Kant, to wrestle that he had never read. That is why he never reached the point of religion: when he most affirmatively affirmed life, life negated him -- that life that cannot be deceived. The lack of religion explains Nietzsche's demise. A person cannot perish on anything other than a lack of religion ... "

Incidentally, Weininger has nothing left for the modernists; so he speaks z. For example, from their "schoolboy opposition to all sizes of history." All language critics, "from Baco to Fritz Mauthner" are in his view "flat heads".

Especially instructive are also Weininger's Intuitions about the natural sciences and about medicine. In his view, Judaism ruined science; He preaches the return to natural medicine and reveals in his last time the strangest theories about the origin and nature of diseases. "To do, that is the word for today's factory enterprise of cognition, in which the heads of the great laboratories and seminaries excellently fill the functions of capitalist industrial barons. "Sources" are the words in historical research, "test series" in exact science. Despotically, the number, the statistics, the error method, the accurate weight analysis prevail. Not without deep authority has this science proclaimed all its findings as equally important. The Academies of Sciences are the powerful Gerusia of the state, Schopenhauer talk; in the mouth of the boy the words are strange; but one must never forget that he disregards experience and that he must be judged differently in his towering position. "The gravediggers Darwin's already at work," he explains calmly. "The biological view, as we understand it today, is nothing but a utilitarian; it broadens the utilitarian social principles of famous English flatheads to one of the plant and animal kingdoms " "As the Jews were most eager to embrace Darwinism and the ridiculous theory of the monkey lineage of man, they became almost creatively the founders of that economic conception of the human race, which most completely deletes the spirit from the development of the human race. Formerly Büchner's most enthusiastic supporters., they are now Ostwald's most enthusiastic pioneers." It was only through the Jews that "the impure tackling of things came into the natural sciences." "It is also connected with the influence of the Jewish spirit that medicine, which indeed turned the Jews in droves, has taken its present development. From the savages to today's natural healing movement, of which the Jews were significantly and entirely absent, all healing had something religious, the medicine man was a priest. The purely chemical direction in medicine, that is Judaism." And yet "with chemistry is only to come to grips with the excrement of the living." Weininger ipse sacerdos medicusque; we will see soon:

"Today's health care and therapy is an immoral and therefore unsuccessful; she seeks from the outside inwards, instead of acting from the outside to the outside. It corresponds to the tattooing of the criminal: this changes its external appearance from the outside, rather than by a change of attitude. Every illness has psychological causes, and each one must be healed by man himself, by his will; he has to find his own inner self. All illness, not just hysteria, has only become unconscious, psychic driven into the body; as this is lifted into consciousness, the disease is healed." "Every disease is guilt and punishment; All medicine must be psychiatry and pastoral care. It is something immoral, d. H. The unconscious that leads to the disease; and every illness is healed, as soon as it is recognized and understood by the patient as inwardly. "Diseases are all just poisoning; The soul lacks the courage to lift the poison into consciousness and to render harmless there in the fight. That's why it continues to work in the body. Such poisoning is certainly gout; it should always go back to immoral sexuality." This whole doctrine is found in the "last things"; Smooth insanity speaks from the following two statements, the "All this teaching is found in the "last things "; Smooth insanity speaks from the following two statements, the "All this teaching is found in the" last things "; Smooth insanity speaks from the following two statements, the Weininger wrote in the last days before his death: "Illness is a special case of neurasthenia. Disease is neurasthenia in the body." "The transition from neurasthenia to the disease must form skin disease." Also important for psychiatrists is the realization: "All madness arises only from the intolerability of pain tied to all awareness." Also that the English are "all masochists", may interest. "The fact that a person becomes insane is only possible through his own guilt." Weininger makes claims about the hysteria that should be revolutionary. Without experience, he knows everything better. "Hygienic punishment for denying the very nature of woman is hysteria; it is the organic crisis of the organic mendacity of woman." This the quintessence; If you want to enjoy the nonsense in extenso, you can read it in "Gender and Character" p. 357-375.

From the many statements, the Weininger on epilepsy, especially in his last period, one may suppose that he considered himself an epileptic. "The epileptic seizure is linked to the momentary extinction of the capacity for apperception, and when it is said that crimes are often committed in epileptic seizures, it should probably be expressed in reverse: they are committed against the epileptic seizure whose impending proximity is felt .... Against the most terrible helplessness, which is expressed in epilepsy, he fled into murder - often in the bigotry and bigotry .... Is not epilepsy the loneliness of the criminal? Does not he fall because he has nothing to hold on to?" "Epilepsy is complete helplessness, epilepsy, because the criminal has become the plaything of gravitation. The criminal does not act (sic). Feeling of the Epileptic: As if the light goes out and completely lacks any external support. Ears in the attack: Maybe when the light is missing, sound occurs? "The epileptic has visions of red color: hell, fire."

As mentioned earlier, Weininger appeared in his last time all symbol, all of a secret meaning. In the "last things" are under "animal psychology" and "last aphorisms" almost nothing in this regard. But from them shines the bright madness; the father of the poor considers them to be "germs for later elaboration" and would have preferred to suppress their publication. Some samples will suffice:

"The dog's eye gives the impression that the dog has lost something ... What he has lost is the self, the self-worth, the freedom." "The fear of the dog is a problem; why is there no fear of the horse, of the dove? It is the fear of the criminal. The firelight that follows the black dog (!) Is the fire, the annihilation, the punishment, the fate of evil." "The dog-rage is a strange form; maybe epilepsy, in which man also foams at the mouth." Note the conclusion behind it. The patient in depression closes because he considers himself epileptic: dog = symbol of evil = epilepsy = Weininger, "Not with the same degree of certainty as the dog, but as an enlightening thought, I had the idea that the horse represented the madness. For this speaks the alogical in the behavior of the horse, the nervous and neurasthenic, which is related to the madness ..... The dog barks at the horse: because the evil barks the good." "The bird is the longing of the turtle (the closed Man who makes the conversion but still does not fly)." "Does not the plant-like being of neurasthenia correspond? The lack of mobility in the neurasthenic would explain that well. The neurasthenic is anemic: lack of centralization of the plant: finally, the plant has no sense organs (lack of attention in the neurasthenic)." No less significant are the following two germs: "The red of hell is the opposite of the blue of the sky. It's very deep that the smoke hurts the eye." "All animals are symbols of criminality, all plants are symbols of neurasthenic phenomena in the psyche." That's downright hair-raising. Of course, the smoke as a symbol of evil does the eye, as a symbol of good, since it is related to the light, hurt !! "The malaria is a symbol of inner dulness." "The vortex is the vanity of water and its circularism." "The Fall is individuality and its symbol is the shooting star." "The symbol of the Jewish is the fly. There are many reasons for this: sugar, massiveness, buzzing, intrusiveness, being everywhere, apparent fidelity of the eyes. "The flying symbol probably looks like a reminiscence that the smoke hurts the eye."


Schopenhauer's "Parables, Parables and Fables" go back where it says: "The symbol of impudence and stupidity should be the fly. Because while all the animals shy away from humans ....., she sits down on his nose. "

As finale:

"The moment the fly-like (Jewish?) Becomes unconscious in me, d. H. If I have fly-like "features", I am unfree in this, it becomes the appearance of the fly, towards which I am unfree as a sensation: at the same moment the space is there. Thus, the problem of externalization, the projection of space, is shown as the other side of the problem of animal psychology, of natural symbolism. The criminal hallucinates the poisonous mosquito and dies of false heartbeat fear."

Hopefully, no reader will die of this last impertinence, in horror and horror, both at the profane nonsense stored in these cites, and at the fact that there are people who call them "gold finds and flashlights."

The disease.

Hardly anybody can doubt that the material presented in detail at this point in time does not mean that Weininger is dealing with a philosophically healthy phenomenon, but that it is merely a peculiar mental disorder. It would certainly be of great interest to pursue the personalities through whose blood mixtures a figure like the Weiningers could emerge; unfortunately the material is missing here; Of course it does not depend so much on mental disorders, which are relatively rare in the ascendency of important people, but rather on mental abnormalities, pronounced individualities with pronounced talents and idiosyncrasies. The father of Weininger at any rate, is an unusually gifted man. Weininger himself unmistakably wears all the signs of a so-called degenerate, a Dégénéré (Magnans Dégénéré supérieur) with a strong aftertaste of hysteria. One simply does not have to believe that the word degenerate is to be understood in the sense in which ordinary usage takes it; a degenerate in the psychiatric sense is merely a human being, deviant from the norm of his species, from birth, who may be an idiot or a genius; the greater and more abnormal the spiritual gift, the greater, of course, are the dangers which arise from this degeneration, and from which the average postman is spared. That's how Schopenhauer belongs "To the class of Deséquilibrés, in which, as we know, the fine heads come together" (Moebius).

As a child showed Weiningerbeven his abnormal complaint; already at the age of fourteen "he spoke his German with utmost clarity". As a young man, he showed a keen interest in everything, a very vivacious attitude, an intense desire for learning, a thirst for knowledge that often embarrassed his teachers, and a very extraordinary memory especially for languages. From the very beginning, however, there is already a tremendous sense of self that made him uncomfortable for many people at a very early age. Also, he was quite erotic and has apparently oriented very early on the relevant issues. To his teachers he seems to have been an abomination by his sublime, unauthorized nature, his insubordination, his arrogance; He made fun of his teachers at best; There were several violent performances; that he z. For example, while he was learning other things during lessons, doing what he wanted, not as prescribed, clearly shows how much he felt his own personality; he did not feel the concept of duty; only the one Duty to himself, as he put it later. He therefore had no sense of family, as his own father emphasizes. The great importance that otherwise ordinary events could gain for him is shown by the impression made on him by the needy visit of a few dance tales.

The reading had a colossal influence on him; He read a great deal and one can follow quite well how Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Chamberlain, each for a time filled him until Kant and Wagner came. Towards the end of his high school years, he became more and more excluded from ordinary sociability and worked with great energy. During his first student period of about 2-3 years, he lived "in the sweltering greenhouse air of Viennese life" (Schneider, Allg. Ztg. Beil. 1903, 292), in the headquarters of the most sublime Dekadenze, which has produced so many precocious litteraturheilande and is said that their real sons are already born with pessimistic frowning, at ten years to realize that Michelangelo actually a Tassel, in the early twenties, to feel itself microcosmically as the center of the world. In addition to the peculiarity of Weininger's personality, which gives his psychosis such a special individual moment, this very same Viennese breeding ground should not be underestimated. In touch with all sorts of elements of this company of Mattoiden (Lombroso) then seems at Weininger on the basis of the psychopathic degeneration to have used a mental disorder, which undoubtedly all the characteristics of hysteria[6] and is distinguished by an exquisitely manic-depressive character d. H. It alternated between serene and depressed emotions in periods. Kraepelin says: "Since hysteria is accompanied by a transformation of the whole psychic personality, naturally the most varied, not really hysterical psychoses on this basis will be able to assume a peculiar coloring by the admixture of some special features. This is especially true for the manic-depressive insanity, which we know that it also essentially develops out of morbid disposition." This seems to me completely in the case of Weininger to be applicable, in which the perfect transformation of the personality also stands in the foreground. In his psychosis, clearly four stages can be distinguished: a longer introductory stage of more hypomanic character with the emergence of the dualistic personality, for example, from summer 1901 to graduation, July 1902; followed by a stage of depression, which in the middle of autumn 1902 returned to a gradually almost manic state; finally the second and heaviest depression, which ended with the catastrophe of 4 October 1903. As is often the case with hysteria, mind and memory never show any disturbances. On the other hand, the utterly insufferable self-esteem, the Weininger, is typical shows (he actually only produced in the manic stages); He is always the center, feels his self the strongest, judges everything in the sharpest way. His ambition is burning; he wants to be famous at any price, cause a sensation, whatever the cost. Formerly erotic, at the center of the disease is now a complete sexual aversion, a hatred of all sexuality, which has grown to fanaticism; that's hysterical, too. The symptom of the so-called division of the personality is very clearly pronounced; Weininger called it ethical dualism. Hysterical, and only hysterical, are the unique sensations that he felt when listening to music. The modern degenerative moment in a hysterical psychosis could not be revealed in a more beautiful way.

The "splendid change" that began two years before his death was nothing but the beginning of the hysterical disorder. Also typical are the faxes with the touching humility, which was compatible with the most extreme megalomania. The hysteria, the transformation of his personality, also sprang from his conversion to Christianity. In addition to the psychic symptoms of hysteria, physical dysfunctions appear to have set in; that of Rappaport Cardiac spasms and epileptic seizures are nothing more than hysterical seizures; the son had left home at the first onset of the illness; This also explains why the father did not know about these seizures, which did not appear until the onset of hysteria. Incidentally, they can be completely dispensed with in the picture of the disease without the slightest change in the conception of the psychosis. It can certainly be ruled out that it was not epilepsy, even though the hysterics probably had sensations that he attributed to existing epilepsy. After graduation and conversion to Christianity, what actions he performed really hysterically in one day - followed by efforts for the exam and the highest excitement after success the first depression, in which already suicidal thoughts become loud. But then joined the great, manic period, in the Weininger wrote a large book and a series of smaller essays in about eight months with graphomaniac zeal. In this span also developed a real delusion system of quite hysterical nature, the basis of which was his sexual aversion (not the other way around, as I perhaps wrongly assume, but that is not essential); he worked out a world view whose attempts are already rudimentary in the first period of excitement; he discovers that everything around him is just a symbol; the changed sensation of one's own personality has also been transferred to the outside world, which tells itself differently now than before. Like Christ, who overcomes the strongest negation, Judaism, he feels himself called, even the overcomer of Judaism, to overcome the second, much greater negation in the world, woman; He feels himself a Redeemer, preaches the new Kingdom of God through perfect sexual austerity, and teaches the pre-existence of the soul before birth. He considers himself a saint, a genius, a religious founder; all that is clear enough in his words; He speaks everywhere with absolute certainty and sublimity, even if it is the greatest nonsense, everything in his system, leaves hysterical in his book every particular thought thick and bold print, imagines to have written for millennia u. s. w.

But in the summer of 1903, after the book was born, the excitement began to fade away; ever more lively mood swings occurred; At times, direct hallucinations, as the dogs with the red firelight, appeared the dog's triple barking on that dreadful night; Another strange thing is the feeling of dying of a human, which was indicated by the barking of a dog[7], The lively need for travel, which drove him to Sicily in August (!), Shows sufficiently how it looked in him; how morbid his condition was. For example, the unpleasant sensations that the sunset caused him, which for him became a mystical-symbolic meaning of the most painful kind. The sense of salvation disappeared more and more and gave way to the feeling of guilt, sin, fear, crime; at last he felt all the guilt of the world as his own, thinking that everything that had come into contact with him was cursed. What he wrote in these last days almost gives the impression that a delirious state had come over him. In desperation, over the terrible thoughts that tormented him, he committed suicide. And this suicide in the very nature of its execution testifies only to hysteria. With a bang, he went out of life; He did not sneak away like ordinary suicides to die alone and without attracting attention death is only an end in itself, but in death he wanted to draw the eyes of the world; therefore he listed the tragedy in Beethoven's death-house; only a hysteric could do that.


So we saw that it was Weininger It was an innate degenerative predisposition, and on this basis a hysterical mental disorder with manic-depressive character developed in the middle or end of 1901, which was distinguished above all by perfect transformation of personality, tremendous self-esteem, complete sexual insensitivity, seizures, abnormal sensations, facial hallucinations, periodically changing delusions of size and indebtedness. What makes the case so interesting is the purity of the symptoms and the peculiar, decidedly gifted personality of the patient; one must not forget that he was little over 23 years old when he died; There will probably be few of his age who have the same memory, the same diligence, the same labor, the same knowledge as Weininger. That is why even Moebius, despite all the abhorrence of the book, could not resist regret. The only sad thing is that the case of Weininger proved once again that everything that is written when it is given birth to the world with the necessary applause, finds its admirers. All that is needed for this is a few powerful drummers "to intone the glory of the bad, and their voice finds a echoing and propagating echo at the empty cavern of a thousand fools." ( Schopenhauer on Hegel, Theorem of Sufficient Ground.)

With that I can conclude my considerations about Weininger. I am completely convinced that I will only be contradicted and vehemently reproached by all those who admire him as a genius: for they have already sufficiently documented their inability to criticize through the glorification and admiration which they allowed the Weininger Elaboraten to take part, my arguments for her will also be spoken into the wind. Only this time will come up against this crowd. But one thing I would not want to omit, to say: there are a number of people, the Weininger fought passionately, who are inclined to see in him a modern Herostratos (incidentally also a hysteric); Perhaps my explanations have at least the good that the unfortunate no longer falls for a literary condemnation, but that his opponents, instead of hate and contempt, face Weininger's works, only regret his fate, which drove such a brilliantly gifted brain to madness.

"So what was it that came to him, up to his sublime mist, and thrust the revolver into the hand of the thunderbolt? What was horrible and sweet enough that it forced the shouting, because of him to sin and atone for sin with death? A shot that ended a tragedy unequaled. But a shot in the fog." So Nordhausen in his criticism of "gender and character". Rather, one could talk of a book in the fog, a man in the fog. I hope to have shown what it was that was rising to the sublime fog level. Instead of a thunderbolt, a mentally ill person whose psychosis received its individual moment through a train of ingenuity, instead of a shouting an unfortunate man who shot himself in a fit of melancholy mood, instead of a philosophical phenomenon two books belonging to the medical library of a lunatic asylum.

Sapienti sat!
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