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
The terms in the left-hand row are fundamental characteristics of all
animal and vegetable life. All such life is individual life, not the
life of undivided masses; it manifests itself as the impulse to satisfy
needs, as sexual impulse for the purpose of reproduction. Individuality,
memory, will, love, are those qualities of a second life, which,
although related to organic life to a certain extent, are _toto cœlo_
different from it.
This brings us face to face with the religious idea of the eternal,
higher, _new_ life, and especially with the Christian form of it.
As well as a share in organic life, man shares another life, the ζωη
αιωνιος of the New Dispensation. Just as all earthly life is sustained
by earthly food, this other life requires spiritual sustenance
(symbolised in the communion service). The birth and death of the former
have their counterparts in the latter--the moral re-birth of man, the
“regeneration”--and the end: the final loss of the soul through error or
crime. The one is determined from without by the bonds of natural
causation; the other is ruled by the moral imperative from within. The
one is limited and confined to a definite purpose; the other is
unlimited, eternal and moral. The characters which are in the left row
are common to all forms of lower life; those in the right-hand column
are the corresponding presages of eternal life, manifestations of a
higher existence in which man, and only man, has a share. The perpetual
intermingling and the fresh complications which arise between the higher
and lower natures are the making of all history of the human mind; this
is the plot of the history of the universe.
It is possible that some may perceive in this second life something
which in man might have been derived from the other lower characters;
such a possibility dismiss at once.
A clearer grasp of this sensuous, impressionable lower life will make it
clear that, as I have explained in earlier chapters, the case is
reversed; the lower life is merely a projection of the higher on the
world of the senses, a reflection of it in the sphere of necessity, as a
degradation of it, or its Fall. And the great problem is how the
eternal, lofty idea came to be bound with earth. This problem is the
guilt of the world. My investigation is now on the threshold of what
cannot be investigated; of a problem that so far no one has dared to
answer, and that never will be answered by any human being. It is the
riddle of the universe and of life; the binding of the unlimited in the
bonds of space, of the eternal in time, of the spirit in matter. It is
the relation of freedom to necessity, of something to nothing, of God to
the devil. The dualism of the world is beyond comprehension; it is the
plot of the story of man’s Fall, the primitive riddle. It is the binding
of eternal life in a perishable being, of the innocent in the guilty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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