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
By psychology, as a whole, we generally understand the psychology of the
psychologists, and these are exclusively men! Never since human history
began have we heard of a female psychology! None the less the psychology
of woman constitutes a chapter as important with regard to general
psychology as that of the child. And inasmuch as the psychology of man
has always been written with unconscious but definite reference to man,
general psychology has become simply the psychology of men, and the
problem of the psychology of the sexes will be raised as soon as the
existence of a separate psychology of women has been realised. Kant said
that in anthropology the peculiarities of the female were more a study
for the philosopher than those of the male, and it may be that the
psychology of the sexes will disappear in a psychology of the female.
None the less the psychology of women will have to be written by men. It
is easy to suggest that such an attempt is foredoomed to failure,
inasmuch as the conclusions must be drawn from an alien sex and cannot
be verified by introspection. Granted the possibility that woman could
describe herself with sufficient exactness, it by no means follows that
she would be interested in the sides of her character that would
interest us. Moreover, even if she could and would explore herself
fully, it is doubtful if she could bring herself to talk about herself.
I shall show that these three improbabilities spring from the same
source in the nature of woman.
This investigation, therefore, lays itself open to the charge that no
one who is not female can be in a position to make accurate statements
about women. In the meantime the objection must stand, although, later,
I shall have more to say of it. I will say only this much--up to now,
and is this only a consequence of man’s suppression?--we have no account
from a pregnant woman of her sensations and feelings, neither in poetry
nor in memoirs, nor even in a gynæcological treatise. This cannot be on
account of excessive modesty, for, as Schopenhauer rightly pointed out,
there is nothing so far removed from a pregnant woman as shame as to her
condition. Besides, there would still remain to them the possibility of,
after the birth, confessing from memory the psychical life during the
time; if a sense of shame had prevented them from such communication
during the time, it would be gone afterwards, and the varied interests
of such a disclosure ought to have induced some one to break silence.
But this has not been done. Just as we have always been indebted to men
for really trustworthy expositions of the psychical side of women, so
also it is to men that we owe descriptions of the sensations of pregnant
women. What is the meaning of this?
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