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
Of course, I do not mean to suggest that, when any woman becomes a
prostitute, it is because of an irresistible, inborn craving. Probably
most women have both possibilities in them, the mother and the
prostitute. What is to happen in cases of doubt depends on the man who
is able to make the woman a mother, not merely by the physical act but
by a single look at her. Schopenhauer said that a man’s existence dates
from the moment when his father and mother fell in love. That is not
true. The birth of a human being, ideally considered, dates from the
moment when the mother first saw or heard the voice of the father of her
child. Biological and medical science, under the influence of Johannes
Müller, Th. Bischoff, and Darwin have been completely opposed, for the
last sixty years, to the theory of “impression.” I may later attempt to
develop such a theory. For the present I shall remark only that it is
not fatal to the theory of impression that it does not agree with the
view which regards the union of an ovum and spermatazoon as the only
beginning of a new individual; and science will have to deal with it
instead of regarding it as being opposed to all experience and so
rejecting it. In an _a priori_ science such as mathematics, I may take
it for granted that even on the planet Jupiter 2 and 2 could not make 5,
but biology deals only with propositions of relative universality.
Although I support the theory of the existence of such a power of
impression, it must not be supposed that I think that all malformations
and abnormalities, or even any large number of them, are due to it. I go
no further than to say that it is possible for the progeny to be
influenced by a man, although physical relations between him and the
mother have not taken place. And just as Schopenhauer and Goethe were
correct in their theory of colour, although they were in opposition to
all the physicists of the past, present, and future, so Ibsen (in “The
Lady from the Sea”) and Goethe (in “Elective Affinities”) may be right
against all the scientific men who deal with the problems of inheritance
on a purely physical basis.
If a man has an influence on a woman so great that her children of whom
he is not the father resemble him, he must be the absolute sexual
complement of the woman in question. If such cases are very rare, it is
only because there is not much chance of the absolute sexual complements
meeting, and this is no argument against the truth of the views of
Goethe and Ibsen to which I have just referred.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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