Otto Weininger

Otto Weininger (Vienna, 1880 – Vienna, 1903) was an Austrian philosopher from Cisleitania, the Austrian half of the Habsburg monarchy. His short and controversial work belongs to the debate about sexuality, character and ethics that shaped Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century. He is remembered above all for Sex and Character, a book he wrote in his early twenties and which had an uneven but lasting influence.

He was born into a Jewish family; his father was a goldsmith. As a child he showed an intense curiosity and learned several languages quickly, including Greek, Latin, French and English. At the University of Vienna he became interested in the natural sciences, mathematics and physics as well as philosophy. Around 1901 he shared the views of empiriocriticism, but he soon moved away from positivism. His project, first conceived as a study in biology and psychology, became a philosophical inquiry of broadly Kantian and metaphysical character.

Sex and Character appeared in May 1903 and sold quickly, though its author did not live to see its success. Its central thesis is that every person combines masculine and feminine elements. The masculine would be active, conscious and moral; the feminine passive, unconscious and amoral. Weininger argued that emancipation was possible only for the "masculine woman", and that men should aspire to genius and renounce sexuality in favour of an abstract love of the absolute. Much of the book is devoted to genius, which he believed was not tied to a single field but was a universal quality, probably present in everyone to some degree.

The chapter on Judaism is the most troubling part. Weininger treated it as a tendency of the mind rather than a race or a creed, and linked it to a lack of personality and of a sense of good and evil, in parallel with his view of women. These antisemitic claims are now read as a clear example of prejudice. Parts of his work were later taken up by the National Socialists, which has weighed heavily on his reception.

He took his own life on 4 October 1903 in a house on Schwarzspanierstraße, where Beethoven had died. He left fragments that were published posthumously as Über die letzten Dinge. His influence reached Ludwig Wittgenstein and August Strindberg and, through that lesser-known work, James Joyce. His philosophical value remains debated: many readers value his material on characterology, logic, ethics and the theory of the person, even while rejecting his metaphysics of sex.