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 defenders of the Jew have rightly acquitted him of any tendency to
heinous crimes, and the legal statistics of different countries confirm
this. The Jew is not really anti-moral. But, none the less, he does not
represent the highest ethical type. He is rather non-moral, neither very
good nor very bad, with nothing in him of either the angel or the devil.
Notwithstanding the Book of Job and the story of Eden, it is plain that
the conceptions of a Supreme Good and a Supreme Evil are not truly
Jewish; I have no wish to enter upon the lengthy and controversial
topics of Biblical criticism, but at the least I shall be on sure ground
when I say that these conceptions play the least significant part in
modern Jewish life. Orthodox or unorthodox, the modern Jew does not
concern himself with God and the Devil, with Heaven and Hell. If he does
not reach the heights of the Aryan, he is also less inclined to commit
murder or other crimes of violence.
So also in the case of the woman; it is easier for her defenders to
point to the infrequency of her commission of serious crimes than to
prove her intrinsic morality. The homology of Jew and woman becomes
closer the further examination goes. There is no female devil, and no
female angel; only love, with its blind aversion from actuality, sees in
woman a heavenly nature, and only hate sees in her a prodigy of
wickedness. Greatness is absent from the nature of the woman and the
Jew, the greatness of morality, or the greatness of evil. In the Aryan
man, the good and bad principles of Kant’s religious philosophy are ever
present, ever in strife. In the Jew and the woman, good and evil are not
distinct from one another.
Jews, then, do not live as free, self-governing individuals, choosing
between virtue and vice in the Aryan fashion. They are a mere collection
of similar individuals each cast in the same mould, the whole forming
as it were a continuous plasmodium. The Antisemite has often thought of
this as a defensive and aggressive union, and has formulated the
conception of a Jewish “solidarity.” There is a deep confusion here.
When some accusation is made against some unknown member of the Jewish
race, all Jews secretly take the part of the accused, and wish, hope
for, and seek to establish his innocence. But it must not be thought
that they are interesting themselves more in the fate of the individual
Jew than they would do in the case of an individual Christian. It is the
menace to Judaism in general, the fear that the shameful shadow may do
harm to Judaism as a whole, which is the origin of the apparent feeling
of sympathy. In the same way, women are delighted when a member of their
sex is depreciated, and will themselves assist, until the proceeding
seems to throw a disadvantageous light over the sex in general, so
frightening men from marriage. The race or sex alone is defended, not
the individual.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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