The Man behind the “New Man”

 The Man behind the “New Man”

Otto Weininger’s only book, Sex & Character, is a misogynist, anti-Semitic screed masquerading as philosophy. Yet it was enormously influential in fin-de-siècle Vienna.




There's not any place to begin with Otto Weininger besides his passing. Four months later, he rented a space at the house in which Beethoven expired. He was profoundly depressed, off and on, ever since he'd obtained his doctorate. He wrote a few letters to his loved ones and then shot himself, dying at the hospital shortly later.


Though doing this now would be in poor taste, Viennese society luridly discussed the gruesome, sensational tradition of Weininger's passing. By expiring in Beethoven's home, Weininger allied himself with the composer viewed as the third or second biggest contemporary German (later Wagner and possibly Goethe). Weininger has been viewed as a tortured genius using a fact too strong for your mind and soul to endure. Therefore, to realize that so-called fact, droves of all Austrians picked up copies of Gender and Character.


The contents of Gender and Personality are, for a contemporary reader, nearly indecipherable. It's not easy to envision exactly what made the book a fin-de-siècle feeling, not as an effect on thinkers as diverse as Ludwig Wittgenstein, the composers Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg, the author August Strindberg, as well as James Joyce.


For starters, attempting to read Nature and Sex in English is a challenging proposition. For a hundred decades or so, the sole real translation was, as Wittgenstein explained "beastly." It includes countless mistakes, even creating positive claims damaging ones and vice versa. It contradicts its content, style, and disagreements with the vilest, most slovenly kind of bigotry and devised truisms. The translation corrects a number of those mistakes and reintroduces the 135 pages of endnotes and references, but it's costly and incredibly enlightening.


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