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
An old woman manifests once for all what woman really is. The beauty of
woman, as may be experimentally proved, is only created by love of a
man; a woman becomes more beautiful when a man loves her because she is
passively responding to the will which is in her lover; however deep
this may sound, it is only a matter of everyday experience.
All the qualities of woman depend on her non-existence, on her want of
character; because she has no true, permanent, but only a mortal life,
in her character as the advocate of pairing she furthers the sexual part
of life, and is fundamentally transformed by and susceptible to the man
who has a physical influence over her.
Thus the three fundamental characters of woman with which this chapter
has dealt come together in the conception of her as the non-existent.
Her instability and untruthfulness are only negative deductions from the
premiss of her non-existence. Her only positive character, the
conception of her as the pairing agent, comes from it by a simple
process of analysis. The nature of woman is no more than pairing, no
more than super-individual sexuality.
If we turn to the table of the two kinds of life given earlier in this
chapter, it will be apparent that every inclination from the higher to
the lower is a crime against oneself. Immorality is the will towards
negation, the craving to change the formed into the formless, the wish
for destruction. And from this comes the intimate relation between
femaleness and crime. There is a close relation between the immoral and
the non-moral. It is only when man accepts his own sexuality, denies the
absolute in him, turns to the lower, that he gives woman existence. The
acceptance of the Phallus is immoral. It has always been thought of as
hateful; it has been the image of Satan, and Dante made it the central
pillar of hell.
Thus comes about the domination of the male sexuality over the female.
It is only when man is sexual that woman has existence and meaning.
Her existence is bound up with the Phallus, and so that is her supreme
lord and welcome master.
Sex, in the form of man, is woman’s fate; the Don Juan is the only type
of man who has complete power over her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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