March 17, 2005

Under the Influence

By Scott McLemee

Until recently, discussions of Otto Weininger in English tended to treat him as a one-book author. But Sex and Character was not his only work. Before committing suicide in 1903, Weininger entrusted a set of essays and notebook jottings to a friend, who published them, the next year, as a slender volume called On Last Things. Some cultural historians contend that On Last Things had a more profound effect on other thinkers, over the long run, than the speculations in Sex and Character.

That may be true. And yet Weininger’s posthumous writings seem to be the work of bright young guy who acquired most of his ideas, and all of his style, from the work of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. For all his preoccupation with genius and originality, he was a remarkably derivative thinker. Even the worst of his ideas are echoes of someone else: he borrowed heavily from H. S. Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), one of the major works of “scientific” racism.

This raises a set of questions: Why read Weininger? How is it that he is still remembered beyond the circle of specialists interested in Vienna at the turn of the century? Aside from the new edition of Sex and Character, we also have a recent translation of On Last Things, albeit in an edition that, selling at $110 for not quite 200 pages, leaves you calculating the price of each aphorism. A century later, there is still something intriguing about these books. But what?

Part of the answer, I think, is that interest in Weininger now comes second-hand. Call it the theory of borrowed fascination.

Scarcely anyone now turns to Weininger’s work for its own sake. He fascinates because others (Joyce, Kakfa, Wittengstein) were fascinated. We read his books over the shoulders of the illustrious dead. Or the notorious dead: The author of Sex and Character was the one Jewish writer who met with Hitler’s approval, since Weininger took his own anti-Semitic theories to the logical conclusion of killing himself. (This may sound like a sick joke, but it’s quite literally true.)

The curious thing about this “borrowed fascination” is that it feeds on its own ambiguity. The most telling case in point is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who discovered Sex and Character as an adolescent and continued to admire Weininger for decades — urging British friends to read him, to no avail, it seems. To one colleague who responded to Sex and Character with distaste, Wittgenstein wrote: “It isn’t necessary or rather not possible to agree with [Weininger] but the greatness lies in that with which we disagree. It is his enormous mistake which is great. I.e., roughly speaking if you just add a [negative sign] to the whole book it says an important truth.”

Now, this sounds straightforward enough. It’s rather like Engels saying that Hegel’s dialectics were upside down, and that Marx simply stood the system back on its feet. In each case, the formula is simple — but the longer you try to work out what it might actually mean, the harder it gets to understand. The scholarly literature devoted to figuring out what influence Weininger had on Wittgenstein has become a dense thicket — and it is growing denser still, now that more people are paying attention to On Last Things as well. (For an attempt to chop through some of the undergrowth with a machete, see John Holbo’s review of the most recent volume on the Weininger-Wittgenstein question.)

The effort to understand the persistence of Weininger’s aura seems to lead down cul-de-sacs. So I decided to have a look at the latest biography of the man. As it happens, there is only one. And it also turns out to be the first academic book on Weininger ever published in English, David Abrahamsen’s The Mind and Death of a Genius (Columbia University Press, 1946).

The author, who was born in Norway, did most of his research in Europe before becoming a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. There is a good deal of drama between the lines of his short preface. Following the Nazi invasion, we read, Abrahamsen quit the Norwegian army and left the country with one part of the manuscript. He was reunited with it (and, incidentally, his family) only after arriving in the United States in 1941. In most recent university press books, the author thanks every scholar he or she ever met, beginning no later than graduate school. By contrast, Abrahamsen is much more parsimonious about handing out acknowledgments. When he expresses gratitude “to the late Sigmund Freud, for his invaluable assistance,” it really means something.

The Mind and Death of a Genius is not so much a biography as a kind of psychic autopsy. Abrahamsen had been in touch with Weininger’s friends and family, but the personal details of his life are presented in the tone familiar from the literature of psychoanalytic case-studies. It seems that young Otto had a “negative Oedipus complex.” Instead of wanting to kill his father and sleep with his mother, it was the other way around, or something like that.

In any case, we know almost nothing about Weininger’s mother, while his father appears to have been a complex character — a highly respected goldsmith and an upstanding member of his synagogue, but also (like many a good middle-class man) an anti-Semite. Weininger’s sister recalled that he “knew no moderation in his severity and criticism. He was loved and feared by us all....His demands on us were enormous; if we did not live up to them, he was mortally wounded.” For his part, Otto’s response was to withdraw into dreams of genius. (Sex and Character: “To every great man there comes a moment when he has the absolute certainty that he has an ego of special importance.")

He was certainly a quick study. In late 1900, he learned about some of Freud’s thinking about sexuality from a mutual friend. (This was well before psychoanalysis had any succes de scandale). Weininger transformed his understanding of those ideas into the basis of the dissertation for which he received his doctorate in 1902. With a flair for the dramatic gesture, he joined a Protestant church on the very day he became a Ph.D.

“A warning of the disharmony in his mind was already noticeable,” writes Abrahamsen. The conversion was Weininger’s “effort to escape from conditions he found unbearable into something which he thought would find relief, something better.”

The psychoanalyst’s diagnosis is that Weininger experienced deep conflict about his own sexuality, which sounds like a difficult point to dispute. His speculations were an effort to relieve inner suffering — in part by glorifying it, for Weininger praised robust self-hatred as a necessary tool of the philosopher’s trade. Both his theoretical writing and his suicide were the fulfillment of a tendency in his mind that Abrahamsen contends was pushing Weininger towards schizophrenia.

This makes the first page of Sex and Character truly haunting. “We fend off the world through our concepts,” writes Weininger. “Slowly and gradually we bring the world under the control of our concepts, just as we first restrain a madman’s whole body in rough and ready fashion in order at least to impose some limits on his ability to be a danger....”

Perhaps that image is always at the back of one’s mind while reading Weininger. (That, and the knowledge that the straps did not hold.)

But Abrahamsen’s book also suggests that the young author had a power that went beyond anything manifested in his writing — a quality that impressed even Freud, who denounced Sex and Character as “a rotten book.”

In the fall of 1901, Freud met Weininger. The founder of psychoanalysis was not an easy man to impress. He called most of humanity “riff-raff,” and he was frank in his opinion that Weininger’s manuscripts were the work of “a thief in the scientific field.” But the meeting left a strong impression, even so.

Weininger, then 21, was “a slender, grown-up youth with grave features and a veiled, quite beautiful look in his eyes,” Freud later wrote. “I could not help feeling that I stood in front of a personality with a touch of the genius.”

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