Sex & Character: Authorised Translation from the Sixth German Edition — John Shaqi
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
always remembering that each of the factors α, α´, β, β´ must be greater
than 0 and less than unity.
Further proofs of the validity of this conception are numerous, and I
have already given, in the preface, a few of the most general. We may
recall the existence of “men” with female pelves and female breasts,
with narrow waists, overgrowth of the hair of the head; or of “women”
with small hips and flat breasts, with deep bass voices and beards (the
presence of hair on the chin is more common than is supposed, as women
naturally are at pains to remove it; I am not speaking of the special
growth that often appears on the faces of women who have reached middle
age). All such peculiarities, many of them coinciding in the same
individuals, are well known to doctors and anatomists, although their
general significance has not been understood.
One of the most striking proofs of the view that I have been unfolding
is presented by the great range of numerical variation to be found where
sexual characters have been measured either by the same or by different
anthropological or anatomical workers. The figures obtained by measuring
female characters do not begin where those got from males leave off, but
the two sets overlap. The more obvious this uncertainty in the theory of
sexual intermediate forms may be, the more is it to be deplored in the
interests of true science. Anatomists and anthropologists of the
ordinary type have by no means striven against the scientific
representation of the sexual types, but as for the most part they
regarded measurements as the best indications, they were overwhelmed
with the number of exceptions, and thus, so far, measurement has brought
only vague and indefinite results.
The course of statistical science, which marks off our industrial age
from earlier times, although perhaps on account of its distant relation
to mathematics it has been regarded as specially scientific, has in
reality hindered the progress of knowledge. It has dealt with averages,
not with types. It has not been recognised that in pure, as opposed to
applied, science it is the type that must be studied. And so those who
are concerned with the type must turn their backs on the methods and
conclusions of current morphology and physiology. The real measurements
and investigations of details have yet to be made. Those that now exist
are inapplicable to true science.
Knowledge must be obtained of male and female by means of a right
construction of the ideal man and the ideal woman, using the word ideal
in the sense of typical, excluding judgment as to value. When these
types have been recognised and built up we shall be in a position to
consider individual cases, and their analysis as mixtures in different
proportions will be neither difficult not fruitless.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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