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 subject does not end with the part played by memory. Lying is common
enough amongst men. And lies can be told in spite of a full remembrance
of the subject which for some purpose some one wishes to be informed
about. Indeed, it might almost be said that the only persons who can lie
are those who misrepresent facts in spite of a superior knowledge and
consciousness of them.
Truth must first be regarded as the real value of logic and ethics
before it is correct to speak of deviations from truth for special
motives as lies from the moral point of view. Those who have not this
high conception should be adjudged as guilty rather of vagueness and
exaggeration than of lying; they are not immoral but non-moral. And in
this sense the woman is non-moral.
The root of such an absolute misconception of truth must lie deep. The
continuous memory against which alone a man can be false, is not the
real source of the effort for truth, the desire for truth, the basal
ethical-logical phenomenon, but only stands in intimate relation with
it.
That which enables man to have a real relation to truth and which
removes his temptation to lie, must be something independent of all
time, something absolutely unchangeable, which as faithfully reproduces
the old as if it were new, because it is permanent itself; it can only
be that source in which all discrete experiences unite and which creates
from the first a continuous existence. It is what produces the feeling
of responsibility which oppresses all men, young and old, as to their
actions, which makes them know that they are responsible, which leads to
the phenomena of repentance and consciousness of sin, which calls to
account before an eternal and ever present self things that are long
past, its judgment being subtler and more comprehensive than that of any
court of law or of the laws of society, and which is exerted by the
individual himself quite independently of all social codes (so
condemning the moral psychology which would derive morality from the
social life of man). Society recognises the idea of illegality, but not
of sin; it presses for punishment without wishing to produce repentance;
lying is punished by the law only in its ceremonious form of perjury,
and error has never been placed under its ban. Social ethics with its
conception of duty to our neighbour and to society, and practical
exclusion from consideration of the other fifteen hundred million human
beings, cannot extend the realm of morality, when it begins by limiting
it in this arbitrary fashion.
What is this “centre of apperception” that is superior to time and
change?
It can be nothing less than what raises man above himself (as a part of
the world of sense) which joins him to an order of things that only the
reason can grasp, and that puts the whole world of sense at his feet. It
is nothing else than personality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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