Sex & Character / Authorised Translation from the Sixth German Edition

by Otto Weininger

The positivist will perhaps only laugh at the self-deceived deceiver, the philosopher who asserts that he has had such experiences. Well, it is not easy to prevent it. It is also unnecessary. But I am by no means of the opinion that this “factor of a higher order” plays the same part in all men of genius of a mystical identity of subject and object as Schelling describes it.

Whether there are undivided experiences in which the dualism of actual life is overcome, as is indicated by Plotin and the Indian Mahatmas, or whether this is only the highest intensification of experience, but in principle similar to all others—does not signify here, the coincidence of subject and object, of time and eternity, the representing of God through living men, will neither be demonstrated as possible nor denied as impossible. The experiencing of one’s own “I” is not to be begun by theoretical knowledge, and no one has ever, so far, tried to put it in the position of a systematic philosophy. I shall, therefore, not call this factor of a higher order, which manifests itself in some men in one way and in other men in another way, an essential manifestation of the true ego, but only a phase of it.

Every great man knows this phase of the ego. He may become conscious of it first through the love of a woman, for the great man loves more intensely than the ordinary man; or it may be from the contrast given by a sense of guilt or the knowledge of having failed; these, too, the great man feels more intensely than smaller-minded people. It may lead him to a sense of unity with the all, to the seeing of all things in God, or, and this is more likely, it may reveal to him the frightful dualism of nature and spirit in the universe, and produce in him the need, the craving, for a solution of it, for the secret inner wonder. But always it leads the great man to the beginning of a presentation of the world for himself and by himself, without the help of the thought of others.

This intuitive vision of the world is not a great synthesis elaborated at his writing-table in his library from all the books that have been written; it is something that has been experienced, and as a whole it is clear and intelligible, although details may still be obscure and contradictory. The excitation of the ego is the only source of this intuitive vision of the world as a whole in the case of the artist as in that of the philosopher. And, however different they may be, if they are really intuitive visions of the cosmos, they have this in common, something that comes only from the excitation of the ego, the faith that every great man possesses, the conviction of his possession of an “I” or soul, which is solitary in the universe, which faces the universe and comprehends it.

From the time of this first excitation of his ego, the great man, in spite of lapses due to the most terrible feeling, the feeling of mortality, will live in and by his soul.

And it is for this reason, as well as from the sense of his creative powers, that the great man has so intense a self-consciousness. Nothing can be more unintelligent than to talk of the modesty of great men, of their inability to recognise what is within them. There is no great man who does not well know how far he differs from others (except during these periodical fits of depression to which I have already alluded). Every great man feels himself to be great as soon as he has created something; his vanity and ambition are, in fact, always so great that he over-estimates himself. Schopenhauer believed himself to be greater than Kant. Nietzsche declared that “Thus spake Zarathustra” was the greatest book in the world.

There is, however, a side of truth in the assertion that great men are modest. They are never arrogant. Arrogance and self-realisation are contradictories, and should never be confused although this is often done. A man has just as much arrogance as he lacks of self-realisation, and uses it to increase his own self-consciousness by artificially lowering his estimation of others. Of course the foregoing holds true only of what may be called physiological, unconscious arrogance; the great man must occasionally comport himself with what seems rudeness to contemptible persons.

All great men, then, have a conviction, really independent of external proof, that they have a soul. The absurd fear must be laid aside that the soul is a hyperempirical reality and that belief in it leads us to the position of the theologists. Belief in a soul is anything rather than a superstition and is no mere handmaid of religious systems. Artists speak of their souls although they have not studied philosophy or theology; atheists like Shelley use the expression and know very well what they mean by it.

Others have suggested that the “soul” is only a beautiful empty word, which people ascribe to others without having felt its need for themselves. This is like saying that great artists use symbols to express the highest form of reality without being assured as to the existence of that reality. The mere empiricist and the pure physiologist no doubt will consider that all this is nonsense, and that Lucretius is the only great poet. No doubt there has been much misuse of the word, but if great artists speak of their soul they know what they are about. Artists, like philosophers, know well when they approach the greatest possible reality, but Hume had no sense of this.

The scientific man ranks, as I have already said, and as I shall presently prove, below the artist and the philosopher. The two latter may earn the title of genius which must always be denied to the scientific man. Without any good reason having been assigned for it, it has usually been the case that the voice of genius on any particular problem is listened to before the voice of science. Is there justice in this preference? Can the genius explain things as to which the man of science, as such, can say nothing? Can he peer into depths where the man of science is blind?