Sex & Character / Authorised Translation from the Sixth German Edition

by Otto Weininger

A clearer grasp of this sensuous, impressionable lower life will make it clear that, as I have explained in earlier chapters, the case is reversed; the lower life is merely a projection of the higher on the world of the senses, a reflection of it in the sphere of necessity, as a degradation of it, or its Fall. And the great problem is how the eternal, lofty idea came to be bound with earth. This problem is the guilt of the world. My investigation is now on the threshold of what cannot be investigated; of a problem that so far no one has dared to answer, and that never will be answered by any human being. It is the riddle of the universe and of life; the binding of the unlimited in the bonds of space, of the eternal in time, of the spirit in matter. It is the relation of freedom to necessity, of something to nothing, of God to the devil. The dualism of the world is beyond comprehension; it is the plot of the story of man’s Fall, the primitive riddle. It is the binding of eternal life in a perishable being, of the innocent in the guilty.

But it is evident that neither I nor any other man can understand this. I can understand sin only when I cease to commit it, and the moment I understand it I cease to commit it. So also I can never comprehend life while I am still alive. There is no moment of my life when I am not bound down by this sham existence, and it must be impossible for me to understand the bond until I am free from it. When I understand a thing I am already outside it; I cannot comprehend my sinfulness while I am still sinful.

As the absolute female has no trace of individuality and will, no sense of worth or of love, she can have no part in the higher, transcendental life. The intelligible, hyperempirical existence of the male transcends matter, space, and time. He is certainly mortal, but he is immortal as well. And so he has the power to choose between the two, between the life which is lost with death and the life to which death is only a stepping-stone. The deepest will of man is towards this perfect, timeless existence; he is compact of the desire for immortality. That the woman has no craving for perpetual life is too apparent; there is nothing in her of that eternal which man tries to interpose and must interpose between his real self and his projected, empirical self. Some sort of relation to the idea of supreme value, to the idea of the absolute, that perfect freedom which he has not yet attained, because he is bound by necessity, but which he can attain because mind is superior to matter; such a relation to the purpose of things generally, or to the divine, every man has. And although his life on earth is accompanied by separation and detachment from the absolute, his mind is always longing to be free from the taint of original sin.

Just as the love of his parents was not pure in purpose, but sought more or less a physical embodiment, the son, who is the outcome of that love, will possess his share of mortal life as well as of eternal: we are horrified at the thought of death, we fight against it, cling to this mortal life, and prove from that that we were anxious to be born as we were born, and that we still desire to be born of this world.

But since every male has a relation to the idea of the highest value, and would be incomplete without it, no male is really ever happy. It is only women who are happy. No man is happy, because he has a relation to freedom, and yet during his earthly life he is always bound in some way. None but a perfectly passive being, such as the absolute female, or a universally active being, like the divine, can be happy. Happiness is the sense of perfect consummation, and this feeling a man can never have; but there are women who fancy themselves perfect. The male always has problems behind him and efforts before him: all problems originate in the past; the future is the sphere for efforts. Time has no objective, no meaning, for woman; no woman questions herself as to the reason of her existence; and yet the sole purpose of time is to give expression to the fact that this life can and must mean something.

Happiness for the male! That would imply wholly independent activity, complete freedom; he is always bound, although not with the heaviest bonds, and his sense of guilt increases the further he is removed from the idea of freedom.

Mortal life is a calamity, and must remain so whilst mankind is a passive victim of sensation; so long as he remains not form, but merely the matter on which form is impressed. Every man, however, has some glimmer of higher things; the genius most certainly and most directly. This trace of light, however, does not come from his perceptions; so far as he is ruled by these, man is merely a passive victim of surrounding things. His spontaneity, his freedom, come from his power of judging as to values, and his highest approach to absolute spontaneity and freedom comes from love and from artistic or philosophical creation. Through these he obtains some faint sense of what happiness might be.

Woman can really never be quite unhappy, for happiness is an empty word for her, a word created by unhappy men. Women never mind letting others see their unhappiness, as it is not real; behind it there lies no consciousness of guilt, no sense of the sin of the world.

The last and absolute proof of the thoroughly negative character of woman’s life, of her complete want of a higher existence, is derived from the way in which women commit suicide.

Such suicides are accompanied practically always by thoughts of other people, what they will think, how they will mourn over them, how grieved—or angry—they will be. Every woman is convinced that her unhappiness is undeserved at the time she kills herself; she pities herself exceedingly with the sort of self-compassion which is only a “weeping with others when they weep.”