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 theory of Leibnitz, which is seldom rightly understood, that the
lower monads are a mirror of the world without being conscious of this
capacity of theirs, expresses the same idea. The man of genius lives in
a state of complete understanding, an understanding of the whole; the
whole world is also in ordinary men, but not in a condition that can
become creative. The one lives in conscious active relation with the
whole, the other in an unconscious relation; the man of genius is the
actual, the common man the potential, microcosm. The genius is the
complete man; the manhood that is latent in all men is in him fully
developed.
Man himself is the All, and so unlike a mere part, dependent on other
parts; he is not assigned a definite place in a system of natural laws,
but he himself is the meaning of the law and is therefore free, just as
the world whole being itself, the All does not condition itself but is
unconditioned. The man of genius is he who forgets nothing because he
does not forget himself, and because forgetting, being a functional
subjection to time, is neither free nor ethical. He is not brought
forward on the wave of a historical movement as its child, to be
swallowed up by the next wave, because all, all the past and all the
future is contained in his inward vision. He it is whose consciousness
of immortality is most strong because the fear of death has no terror
for him. He it is who lives in the most sympathetic relation to symbols
and values because he weighs and interprets by these all that is within
him and all that is outside him. He is the freest and the wisest and the
most moral of men, and for these reasons he suffers most of all from
what is still unconscious, what is chaos, what is fatality within him.
How does the morality of great men reveal itself in their relations to
other men? This, according to the popular view, is the only form which
morality can assume, apart from contraventions of the penal code. And
certainly in this respect, great men have displayed the most dubious
qualities. Have they not laid themselves open to accusations of base
ingratitude, extreme harshness, and much worse faults?
It is certainly true that the greater an artist or philosopher may be,
the more ruthless he will be in keeping faith with himself, in this very
way often disappointing the expectations of those with whom he comes in
contact in every-day life; these cannot follow his higher flights and
so try to bind the eagle to earth (Goethe and Lavater) and in this way
many great men have been branded as immoral.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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