Sex & Character / Authorised Translation from the Sixth German Edition

by Otto Weininger

Since all beauty is always only the constantly renewed endeavour to embody the highest form of value, there is a pre-eminently satisfying element in it, in the face of which all desire, all self-seeking fade away.

All forms of beauty which appeal to man, by reason of the æsthetic function, are in reality also attempts on his part to realise the ideal. Beauty is the symbol of perfection in being. Therefore beauty is inviolable; it is static and not dynamic; so that any alteration with regard to it upsets and annuls the idea of it. The desire of personal worthiness, the love of perfection, materialise in the idea of beauty. And so the beauty of nature is born, a beauty that the criminal can never know, as ethics first create nature. Thus it is that nature always and everywhere, in its greatest and smallest forms, gives the impression of perfection. The natural law is only the mortal symbol of the moral law, as natural beauty is the manifestation of nobility of the soul; logic thus becomes the embodiment of ethics! Just as love creates a new woman for man instead of the real woman, so art, the eroticism of the All, creates out of chaos the plenitude of forms in the universe; and just as there is no natural beauty without form, without a law of nature, so also there is no art without form, no artistic beauty which does not conform to the laws of art. Natural beauty is no less a realisation of artistic beauty than the natural law is the fulfilment of the moral law, the natural reflection of that harmony whose image is enthroned in the soul of man. The nature which the artist regards as his teacher, is the law which he creates out of his own being.

I return to my own theme from these analyses of art, which are no more than elaborations of the thoughts of Kant and Schelling (and of Schiller writing under their influence). The main proposition for which I have argued is that man’s belief in the morality of woman, his projection of his own soul upon her, and his conception of the woman as beautiful, are one and the same thing, the second being the sensuous side of the first.

It is thus intelligible, although an inversion of the truth, when, in morality, a beautiful soul is spoken of, or when, following Shaftesbury and Herbart, ethics are subordinated to æsthetics; following Socrates and Plato we may identify the good and the beautiful, but we must not forget that beauty is only a bodily image in which morality tries to represent itself, that all æsthetics are created by ethics. Every individual and temporal presentation of this attempted incarnation must necessarily be illusory, and can have no more than a fictitious reality. And so all individual cases of beauty are impermanent; the love that is directed to a woman must perish with the age of the woman. The idea of beauty is the idea of nature and is permanent, whilst every beautiful thing, every part of nature, is perishable. The eternal can realise itself in the limited and the concrete only by an illusion; it is self-deception to seek the fulness of love in a woman. As all love that attaches itself to a person must be impermanent, the love of woman is doomed to unhappiness. All such love has this source of failure inherent in it. It is an heroic attempt to seek for permanent worth where there is no worth. The love that is attached to enduring worth is attached to the absolute, to the idea of God, whether that idea be a pantheistic conception of enduring nature, or remain transcendental; the love that attaches itself to an individual thing, as to a woman, must fail.

I have already partly explained why man takes this burden on himself. Just as hatred is a projection of our own evil qualities on other persons in order that we may stand apart from them and hate them; just as the devil was invented to serve as a vehicle of all the evil impulses in man; so love has the purpose of helping man in his battle for good, when he feels that he himself is not strong enough. Love and hate are alike forms of cowardice. In hate we picture to ourselves that our own hateful qualities exist in another, and by so doing we feel ourselves partly freed from them. In love we project what is good in us, and so having created a good and an evil image we are more able to compare and value them.

Lovers seek their own souls in the loved ones, and so love is free from the limits I described in the first part of this book, not being bound down by the conditions of merely sexual attraction. In spite of their real opposition, there is an analogy between erotics and sexuality. Sexuality uses the woman as the means to produce pleasure and children of the body; erotics use her as the means to create worth and children of the soul. A little understood conception of Plato is full of the deepest meaning: that love is not directed towards beauty, but towards the procreation of beauty; that it seeks to win immortality for the things of the mind, just as the lower sexual impulse is directed towards the perpetuation of the species.

It is more than a merely formal analogy, a superficial, verbal resemblance, to speak of the fruitfulness of the mind, of its conception and reproduction, or, in the words of Plato, to speak of the children of the soul. As bodily sexuality is the effort of an organic being to perpetuate its own form, so love is the attempt to make permanent one’s own soul or individuality. Sexuality and love are alike the effort to realise oneself, the one by a bodily image, the other by an image of the soul. But it is only the man of genius who can approach this entirely unsensuous love, and it is only he who seeks to produce eternal children in whom his deepest nature shall live for ever.

The parallel may be carried further. Since Novalis first called attention to it, many have insisted on the association between sexual desire and cruelty. All that is born of woman must die. Reproduction, birth, and death are indissolubly associated; the thought of untimely death awakens sexual desire in its fiercest form, as the determination to reproduce oneself. And so sexual union, considered ethically, psychologically, and biologically, is allied to murder; it is the negation of the woman and the man; in its extreme case it robs them of their consciousness to give life to the child. The highest form of eroticism, as much as the lowest form of sexuality, uses the woman not for herself but as means to an end—to preserve the individuality of the artist. The artist has used the woman merely as the screen on which to project his own idea.

The real psychology of the loved woman is always a matter of indifference. In the moment when a man loves a woman, he neither understands her nor wishes to understand her, although understanding is the only moral basis of association in mankind. A human being cannot love another that he fully understands, because he would then necessarily see the imperfections which are an inevitable part of the human individual, and love can attach itself only to perfection. Love of a woman is possible only when it does not consider her real qualities, and so is able to replace the actual psychical reality by a different and quite imaginary reality. The attempt to realise one’s ideal in a woman, instead of the woman herself, is a necessary destruction of the empirical personality of the woman. And so the attempt is cruel to the woman; it is the egoism of love that disregards the woman, and cares nothing for her real inner life.

Thus the parallel between sexuality and love is complete. Love is murder. The sexual impulse destroys the body and mind of the woman, and the psychical eroticism destroys her psychical existence. Ordinary sexuality regards the woman only as a means of gratifying passion or of begetting children. The higher eroticism is merciless to the woman, requiring her to be merely the vehicle of a projected personality, or the mother of psychical children. Love is not only anti-logical, as it denies the objective truth of the woman and requires only an illusory image of her, but it is anti-ethical with regard to her.