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 process of clarification may be reversed, and the act of forgetting
is such a reversal. This may take a considerable time, and is usually
noticed only by accident at some point or other of its course. The
process is similar to the gradual obliteration of well-made roads, for
the maintenance of which no provision has been made. The faint
anticipations of a thought are very like the faint recollections of it,
and the latter gradually become blurred as in the case of a neglected
road over the boundaries of which animals stray, slowly obliterating it.
In this connection a practical rule for memorising, discovered and
applied by a friend of mine, is interesting. It generally happens that
if one wants to learn, say, a piece of music, or a section from the
history of philosophy, one has to go over parts of it again and again.
The problem was, how long should the intervals be between these
successive attempts to commit to memory? The answer was that they should
not be so long as to make it possible to take a fresh interest in the
subject again, to be interested and curious about it. If the interval
has produced that state of mind, then the process of clarification must
begin from the beginning again. The rather popular physiological theory
of Sigismund Exner as to the formation of “paths” in the nervous system
may perhaps be taken as a physical parallel of the process of
clarification. According to the theory, the nerves, or rather the
fibrils, make paths easy for the stimulations to travel along, if these
stimulations last sufficiently long or are repeated sufficiently often.
So also in the case of forgetting; what happens is that these paths or
processes of the nerve-cells atrophy from disuse. Avenarius would have
explained the above processes by his theory of the articulation of the
fibres of the brain, but his physical doctrine was rather too crude and
too simple for application to psycho-physics. None the less his
conception of articulation or jointing is both convenient and
appropriate in its application to the process of clarification, and I
shall employ it in that connection.
The process of clarification must be traced thoroughly in order to
realise its importance, but for the moment, it is important to consider
only the initial stage. The distinction of Avenarius between “element”
and “character,” which later on will become evident in a process of
clarification, is not applicable to the very earliest moments of the
process. It is necessary to coin a name for those minds to which the
duality of element and character becomes appreciable at no stage of the
process. I propose for psychical data at this earliest stage of their
existence the word Henid (from the Greek ἑν, because in them it is
impossible to distinguish perception and sensation as two analytically
separable factors, and because, therefore, there is no trace of duality
in them).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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