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
But even in the details of her body a woman is not wholly beautiful, not
even if she is a flawless, perfect type of her sex. The genitalia are
the chief difficulty in the way of regarding her as theoretically
beautiful. If the idea were justified that man’s love for woman is the
direct result of his sexual impulse; if we could agree with Schopenhauer
that “the under-sized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-limbed
sex is called beautiful only because the male intellect is befogged by
the sexual impulse, that impulse being the creator of the conception of
the beauty of woman,” it would follow that the genitalia could not be
excluded from the conception of beauty. It requires no lengthy
exposition to prove that the genitalia are not regarded as beautiful,
and that, therefore, the beauty of woman cannot be regarded as due to
the sexual impulse. In fact, the sexual impulse is in reality opposed to
the conception of beauty. The man who is most under its influence has
least sense of female beauty, and desires any woman merely because she
is a woman.
A woman’s nude body is distasteful to man because it offends his sense
of shame. The easy superficiality of our day has given colour to the
statement that the sense of shame has arisen from the wearing of
clothes, and it has been urged that the objection to the nude arises
from those who are unnatural and secretly immorally-minded. But a man
who has become immorally-minded no longer is interested in the nude as
such, because it has lost its influence on him. He merely desires and no
longer loves. All true love is modest, like all true pity. There is only
one case of shamelessness--a declaration of love the sincerity of which
a man is convinced of in the moment he makes it. This would represent
the conceivable maximum of shamelessness; but there is no declaration of
love which is quite true, and the stupidity of women is shown by their
readiness to believe such protestations.
The love bestowed by the man is the standard of what is beautiful and
what is hateful in woman. The conditions are quite different in
æsthetics from those in logic or ethics. In logic there is an abstract
truth which is the standard of thought; in ethics there is an ideal good
which furnishes the criterion of what ought to be done, and the value of
the good is established by the determination to link the will with the
good. In æsthetics beauty is created by love; there is no determining
law to love what is beautiful, and the beautiful does not present itself
to human beings with any imperative command to love it. (And so there is
no abstract, no super-individual “right” taste).
All beauty is really more a projection, an emanation of the requirements
of love; and so the beauty of woman is not apart from love, it is not an
objective to which love is directed, but woman’s beauty is the love of
man; they are not two things, but one and the same thing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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