Wittgenstein admired Otto Weininger's book most for how wrong it was
Otto Weininger published one book, Sex and Character, and died by suicide months later at 23 in the Vienna house where Beethoven had died. The dramatic death made the book famous. Wittgenstein called its author a great genius, yet said that negating the entire work would express an important truth.
Weininger was born in Vienna in 1880, son of a Jewish goldsmith, and entered the University of Vienna in 1898 to study philosophy and psychology alongside science and medicine. He was a formidable linguist, learning Greek, Latin, French and English young and later Spanish and Italian. Sigmund Freud declined to recommend his thesis to a publisher, but his professors accepted it, and he received his doctorate in July 1902, converting to Protestantism shortly afterwards. A performance of Wagner's Parsifal at Bayreuth moved him deeply, and after travelling to Christiania to see Ibsen's Peer Gynt he returned to Vienna in the grip of depression.
Sex and Character, issued in June 1903, claims every person blends a male and a female substance. Weininger cast the male element as active, logical and moral and the female as passive and amoral, arguing that only a masculine woman could be emancipated. He insisted true genius is always universal rather than confined to one field. A notorious chapter portrayed Jewishness, which he described as a mental tendency rather than a race, as feminine and irreligious; he has often been cited as a textbook case of Jewish self-hatred.
Initial reviews were mild, and a Leipzig professor, Paul Julius Möbius, accused him of plagiarism. His death that October turned him into a cause célèbre and prompted imitation suicides. August Strindberg praised the book effusively, Nikolai Berdyaev ranked it the most remarkable thing since Nietzsche, and his lesser-known writing influenced James Joyce. Italian intellectuals embraced it as an alternative to Freud.
Its legacy is dark. Nazi propagandists quoted fragments, even though Weininger rejected their racial theories, and Dietrich Eckart twisted his ideas into a call to purge inner Jewishness. Historians see his work as a step towards using systematic philosophy to push women and Jews out of public life. Allan Janik judged the first English translation of 1906 wretched and distorted, and the 2005 version exemplary.
Source: Otto Weininger
