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
I must now raise the question--is a psychology of the male possible as a
science? The answer must be that it is not possible. I must be
understood to reject all the investigations of the experimenters, and
those who are still sick with the experimental fever may ask in wonder
if all these have no value? Experimental psychology has not given a
single explanation as to the deeper laws of masculine life; it can be
regarded only as a series of sporadic empirical efforts, and its method
is wrong inasmuch as it seeks to reach the kernel of things by surface
examination, and as it cannot possibly give an explanation of the
deep-seated source of all psychical phenomena. When it has attempted to
discover the real nature of psychical phenomena by measurements of the
physical phenomena that accompany them, it has succeeded in showing that
even in the most favourable cases there is an inconstancy and variation.
The fundamental possibility of reaching the mathematical idea of
knowledge is that the data should be constant. As the mind itself is the
creator of time and space, it is impossible to expect that geometry and
arithmetic should explain the mind, that the creature should explain the
creator.
There can be no scientific psychology of man, for the aim of psychology
is to derive what is not derivative, to prove to every man what his real
nature and essence are, to deduce these. But the possibility of deducing
them would imply that they were not free. As soon as it has been
admitted that the conduct, action, nature, of an individual man can be
determined scientifically, it will be proved that man has no free-will.
Kant and Schopenhauer understood this fully, and, on the other hand,
Hume and Herbart, the founders of modern psychology, did not believe in
free-will. It is this dilemma that is the cause of the pitiful relation
of modern psychology to all fundamental questions. The wild and repeated
efforts to derive the will from psychological factors, from perception
and feeling, are in themselves evidence that it cannot be taken as an
empirical factor. The will, like the power of judgment, is associated
inevitably with the existence of an ego, or soul. It is not a matter of
experience, it transcends experience, and until psychology recognises
this extraneous factor, it will remain no more than a methodical annex
of physiology and biology. If the soul is only a complex of experiences
it cannot be the factor that makes experiences possible. Modern
psychology in reality denies the existence of the soul, but the soul
rejects modern psychology.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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