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
All forms of beauty which appeal to man, by reason of the æsthetic
function, are in reality also attempts on his part to realise the ideal.
Beauty is the symbol of perfection in being. Therefore beauty is
inviolable; it is static and not dynamic; so that any alteration with
regard to it upsets and annuls the idea of it. The desire of personal
worthiness, the love of perfection, materialise in the idea of beauty.
And so the beauty of nature is born, a beauty that the criminal can
never know, as ethics first create nature. Thus it is that nature always
and everywhere, in its greatest and smallest forms, gives the impression
of perfection. The natural law is only the mortal symbol of the moral
law, as natural beauty is the manifestation of nobility of the soul;
logic thus becomes the embodiment of ethics! Just as love creates a new
woman for man instead of the real woman, so art, the eroticism of the
All, creates out of chaos the plenitude of forms in the universe; and
just as there is no natural beauty without form, without a law of
nature, so also there is no art without form, no artistic beauty which
does not conform to the laws of art. Natural beauty is no less a
realisation of artistic beauty than the natural law is the fulfilment of
the moral law, the natural reflection of that harmony whose image is
enthroned in the soul of man. The nature which the artist regards as his
teacher, is the law which he creates out of his own being.
I return to my own theme from these analyses of art, which are no more
than elaborations of the thoughts of Kant and Schelling (and of Schiller
writing under their influence). The main proposition for which I have
argued is that man’s belief in the morality of woman, his projection of
his own soul upon her, and his conception of the woman as beautiful, are
one and the same thing, the second being the sensuous side of the first.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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