Otto Weininger: the Theory Between Genius and Genida

Abstract

Otto Weininger’s book “Geschlecht und Charakter” (“Gender and Character”, 1903) is not only a monument of the epoch, but also a symptom of an epistemological kind. The transition from positivism and associative psychology to psychoanalysis and phenomenology was made at the personal level of an individual scientist, manifested very painfully through overcoming (not always successful) internal tensions of the creative person materialized in active misogyny and conscious “self-hatred” (anti-Semitism). Such extremes of an ideological and rhetorical kind are themselves paradoxical tools for criticizing traditional patriarchal values of European culture with innate masculine and biologically conditioned superiority. Weininger’s literary-critical experience is an example of unconscious idolatry, where the individual Ego, close to genius, is forced to perform or stage self-deification in the face of existential threats, which inevitably turns into self-exposure and self-abolition.