Sex & Character: Authorised Translation from the Sixth German EditionWeininger, Otto
Philosophy
Sex & Character: Authorised Translation from the Sixth German Edition
Weininger, Otto
Character; Sex; Sex (Psychology); Sexual ethics
the attempts of man to understand them. The woman does not interest
herself about herself, and hence there have been no female
psychologists, no psychology of women written by a woman, and she is
incapable of grasping the anxious desire of the man to understand the
beginning, middle, and end of his individual life in their relation to
each other, and to interpret the whole as a continual, logical,
necessary sequence.
At this point there is a natural transition to logic. A creature like
woman, the absolute woman, who is not conscious of her own identity at
different stages of her life, has no evidence of the identity of the
subject-matter of thought at different times. If in her mind the two
stages of a change cannot be present simultaneously by means of memory,
it is impossible for her to make the comparison and note the change. A
being whose memory is never sufficiently good as to make it
psychologically possible to perceive identity through the lapse of time,
so as to enable her, for instance, to pursue a quantity through a long
mathematical reckoning; such a creature in the extreme case would be
unable to control her memory for even the moment of time required to say
that A will be still A in the next moment, to pronounce judgment on the
identity A = A, or on the opposite proposition that A is not equal to A,
for that proposition also requires a continuous memory of A to make the
comparison possible.
I have been making no mere joke, no facetious sophism or paradoxical
proposition. I assert that the judgment of identity depends on
conceptions, never on mere perceptions and complexes of perceptions, and
the conceptions, as logical conceptions, are independent of time,
retaining their constancy, whether I, as a psychological entity, think
them constant or not. But man never has a conception in the purely
logical form, for he is a psychological being, affected by the condition
of sensations; he is able only to form a general idea (a typical,
connotative, representative conception) out of his individual
experiences by a reciprocal effacing of the differences and
strengthening of the similarities, thus, however, very closely
approximating to an abstract conception, and in a most wonderful fashion
using it as such. He must also be able to preserve this idea which he
thinks clear, although in reality it is confused, and it is memory alone
that brings about the possibility of that. Were he deprived of memory he
would lose the possibility of thinking logically, for this possibility
is incarnated, so to speak, only in a psychological medium.
Memory, then, is a necessary part of the logical faculty. The
propositions of logic are not conditioned by the existence of memory,
but only the power to use them. The proposition A = A must have a
psychological relation to time, otherwise it would be At₁ = At₂.
Of course this is not the case in pure logic, but man has no special
faculty of pure logic, and must act as a psychological being.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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