1. The two most useful biographies of Weininger are Abrahamsen, David, The Mind and Death of a Genius (New York, 1946)Google Scholar; and Rider, Jacques Le, Der Fall Otto Weininger: Wurzeln des Antifeminismus und Antisemitismus, trans. Hornig, Dieter (Vienna, 1985).Google Scholar

2. The first edition of the work has recently been reprinted: Weininger, Otto, Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Munich, 1980)Google Scholar: all page references in this paper are to this edition. Quotations in English follow the anonymous translation, Sex and Character (New York, 1906)Google Scholar but rarely without significant revisions. All other translations, unless otherwise mentioned, are my own. After Weininger's death, his friends and literary executors published some of his drafts, aphorisms, and letters in two collections: Weininger, Otto, Über die letzten Dinge (Vienna, 1904)Google Scholar and Weininger, , Taschenbuch und Briefe an einen Freund (Leipzig, 1919)Google Scholar. Although interesting, these drafts add little of substance to the argument of Geschlecht und Charakter and I have ignored them in this paper.

3. The reception of Weininger's work deserves a paper in itself. For an overview, see Sengoopta, Chandak, “Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna: Otto Weininger and the Meanings of Gender” (Ph.D. diss., The Johns Hopkins University, 1996), 411–60.Google Scholar For examples of recent approaches to Weininger, see the essays in Harrowitz, Nancy A. and Hyams, Barbara, eds., Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger (Philadelphia, 1995)Google Scholar; and Rider, Jacques Le and Leser, Norbert, eds., Otto Weininger: Werk und Wirkung (Vienna, 1984).Google Scholar

4. Allan Janik has long been emphasizing these points. See his articles, “Therapeutic Nihilism: How Not to Write about Otto Weininger,” in Structure and Gestalt: Philosophy and Literature in Austria-Hungary and Her Successor States, ed. Smith, Barry (Amsterdam, 1981), 263–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Weininger and the Science of Sex: Prolegomena to Any Future Study,” in Decadence and Innovation: Austro-Hungarian Life and Art at the Turn of the Century, ed. Pynsent, Robert B. (London, 1989), 24–32Google Scholar; and “Writing about Weininger,” in Janik, , Essays on Wittgenstein and Weininger (Amsterdam, 1985), 96–115.Google Scholar See also Janik, A., “Must Anti-Modernism be Irrational?”Google Scholar in Janik, , How Not to Interpret a Culture: Essays on the Problem of Method in the Geisteswissenschaften (Bergen, 1986), 66–84.Google ScholarPubMed

5. Leopold Weininger died in 1922 and it is possible that he had left Judaism by then. His death was not registered by the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde of Vienna. See Abrahamsen, , Mind and Death, 10.Google Scholar

6. Abrahamsen, , Mind and Death, 14.Google Scholar At age sixteen, he had written an etymological essay on certain Greek adjectives found only in Homer and attempted unsuccessfully to publish it in a leading philological journal of the time. A linguist has recently tried to reconstruct this lost essay on the basis of descriptions in Weininger's letters. See Mayrhofer, Manfred, “Ein indogermanistischer Versuch Otto Weiningers,” Historische Sprachforschung (Historical Linguistics) 104 (1991): 303–6.Google Scholar

7. See Rodlauer, Hannelore, “Fragmente aus Weiningers Bildungsgeschichte (1895–1902),”Google Scholar in Otto Weininger, Eros und Psyche: Studien und Briefe 1899–1902, ed. Rodlauer, H. (Vienna, 1990), 13–53Google Scholar, here 16. Weininger's biomedical training critically influenced his approach to gender and sexuality in Geschlecht und Charakter, a fact that has not been adequately recognized by scholars. Allan Janik considers this to be the central deficiency of recent research on Weininger. See Janik, , “Therapeutic Nihilism,”Google Scholar and Janik, , “Weininger and the Science of Sex.”Google Scholar

8. See Weininger's curriculum vitae in Rodlauer, , ed., Otto Weininger, 210–11.Google Scholar On critical positivism, see Mandelbaum, Maurice, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore, 1971), 10–20Google Scholar; and Kolakowski, Leszek, The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positivist Thought, trans. Guterman, Norbert (New York, 1969), 101–28.Google Scholar Avenarius and Mach themselves denied that they were positivists. Avenarius coined the term “Empiriocriticism,” derived from “empiricism” and “criticism,” to describe his philosophy. See Carstanjen, Friedrich, “Richard Avenarius and His General Theory of Knowledge, Empiriocriticism,” trans. Bosanquet, H., Mind new ser. 6 (1897): 449–75.Google Scholar

9. On Freud's early reputation within Central Europe, see Decker, Hannah S., Freud in Germany: Revolution and Reaction in Science, 1893–1907 (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; and Worbs, Michael, Nervenkunst: Literatur und Psychoanalyse im Wien der Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt am Main, 1983).Google Scholar

10. See The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904, trans, and ed. Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).Google Scholar This friendship has been “psychoanalyzed” by several commentators. See, for instance, Mahony, Patrick, “Friendship and its Discontents,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 15 (1979): 55–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. After Weininger's death, the transmission of this idea (from Freud to Weininger through Swoboda) created a major controversy. The most cogent and well-informed overview of the episode is provided by Sulloway, Frank J., Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (New York, 1977), 223–29.Google Scholar See also Eissler, Kurt R., Talent and Genius: The Fictitious Case of Tausk Contra Freud (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; and Heller, Peter, “A Quarrel over Bisexuality,” in The Turn of the Century: German Literature and Art, 1890–1915, ed. Chapple, Gerald and Schulte, Hans H. (Bonn, 1981), 87–115.Google Scholar

12. Letter to Swoboda dated 14 February 1901, in Rodlauer, , ed., Otto Weininger, 68.Google Scholar Weininger's own sexual “aberrations” may have conditioned his choice of subject but the evidence is too scanty to be useful. In any case, Viennese intellectuals and artists did not need to be sexually disturbed—not extraordinarily disturbed, at any rate—to develop a serious interest in the subject of sex. In fin-de-siècle Vienna, Edward Timms suggests, sexuality became a “symbolic territory” for debates on identity, reason, and irrationalism. David Luft adds that Viennese intellectuals were distinctive in combining biological approaches to sex with a Schopenhauerian irrationalism, which stressed the internal reality of feelings. Geschlecht und Charakter is one of the major representatives of this tradition. See Timms, Edward, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven, 1986), 28–29Google Scholar; and Luft, David S., “Science and Irrationalism in Freud's Vienna,” Modem Austrian Literature 23 no. 2 (1990): 89–97.Google Scholar

13. See Rodlauer, Hannelore, “Von ‘Eros und Psyche’ zu ‘Geschlecht und Charakter’: Unbekannte Weininger-Manuskripte im Archiv der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften,” Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-historische Klasse: Anzeiger 124 (1987): 110–39Google Scholar, here 113. These outlines, entitled “Eros und Psyche” and “Zur Theorie des Lebens,” are reprinted in Rodlauer, , ed., Otto Weininger.Google Scholar

14. At least two factors were important in his decision: a preoccupation with Henrik Ibsen's reflections on man's inner self in his play Peer Gynt and deeper acquaintance with Immanuel Kant's metaphysical and ethical analyses of the empirically undemonstrable noumenal self. Referring to Mach's conviction that the coherent, unified self was a fiction that could not be “salvaged,” Weininger declared: “The self is. There is absolutely no need to ‘salvage’ it.” See Weininger, Otto, Letter to Swoboda, H. dated 2 March 1902Google Scholar, in Rodlauer, ed., Otto Weininger, 107–8.

15. Sigmund Freud, who read one version of Weininger's manuscript, exclaimed in exasperation: “The world wants evidence, not thoughts!” See Weininger, O., undated letter to H.Swoboda (probably October 1901)Google Scholar, in ibid, 87.

16. See the examiners' reports in ibid, 211–14.

17. Steven Beller has shown that many Jewish intellectuals of Vienna converted to Prot-estantism rather than to the Habsburg state religion of Catholicism because of their strong identification with the Lutheran culture of northern Germany. See Beller, S., Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 1989), 153.Google Scholar

18. Weininger seemed so depressed at this time that the friend, Artur Gerber, feared he might commit suicide immediately. See Gerber, A., “Ecce homo,”Google Scholar in Weininger, Otto, Taschenbuch und Briefe an einen Freund (Leipzig, 1919), 17–20.Google Scholar

19. Sander Gilman points out that Beethoven was not simply a great artist to early-twentieth-century Central Europeans but “the quintessential German artist.” Weininger's decision to kill himself in Beethoven's death chamber was obviously his last and most dramatic attempt to identify with the spirit of Germany. See Gilman, Sander L., Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore, 1986), 248.Google Scholar

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26. See Mach, E., Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältniss des Physischen zum Psychischen, 4th ed. (Jena, 1903), 20.Google Scholar Mach's original sentence, “Das Ich ist unrettbar,” was translated somewhat inadequately as “the ego must be given up” in Mach, E., The Analysis of Sensations, trans. Williams, C. M. and Waterlow, S. (New York, 1959), 17.Google Scholar

27. Bahr, Hermann, Bilderbuch (Vienna, 1921)Google Scholar, cited and translated in Blackmore, , Ernst Mach, 155.Google Scholar

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40. See Mosedale, Susan Sleeth, “Science Corrupted: Victorian Biologists Consider ‘The Woman Question,’” Journal of the History of Biology 11 (1978): 1–55Google Scholar; Sayers, Janet, Biological Politics: Feminist and Anti-Feminist Perspectives (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Russett, Cynthia Eagle, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)Google Scholar; and Tuana, , The Less Noble Sex.Google Scholar Almost all of these studies have an Anglo-American focus. The Central European discourse remains insufficiently explored, but see Honegger, Claudia, Die Ordnung der Geschlechter: Die Wissenschaften vom Menschen und das Weib, 1750–1850 (Frankfurt am Main, 1991).Google Scholar

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60. Exactly how one could transcend it, however, was difficult to answer. Certainly, conversion to Christianity was not universally accepted as satisfactory. The Jewish character, critics argued, could not be “washed away” by baptismal water. Biological racism was a later innovation, and when grafted on to this earlier psychological/cultural racism, left absolutely no scope for the individual to transcend his “Jewishness,” even if he desired to. See Rose, Paul Lawrence, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, 1990), xvi–xvii, 14–15.Google Scholar

61. Ibid, xvi.

62. Ibid, 12. Otto Weininger observes that among intellectuals, only Friedrich Nietzsche and dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing were philosemitic. Weininger attributes Nietzsche's philosemitism to his opposition to Richard Wagner and Arthur Schopenhauer. As for Lessing, Weininger dismisses him curtly as “greatly overrated” (p. 586).

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69. See Rozenblit, Marsha L., The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: Assimilation and Identity (Albany, N.Y., 1983).Google Scholar In 1848, there had been, at most, 4000 Jews in Vienna. By the end of the century, the Jewish population had risen to 150,000, approximately nine percent of the total population of the city. Around 1900, only about 20 percent of all Jews living in the city had been born there, ibid., 18. The Jewish migration to Vienna was part of a larger European trend of Jewish migration to cities from outlying provinces, ibid, 15–16.

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71. Stone, Norman, Europe Transformed 1878–1919 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 404–11.Google Scholar

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73. Ibid., 73–78.

74. Ibid., 102–3.

75. Ibid., 106–13. Of all who left Judaism, as many as a quarter converted to Protestantism, including Victor Adler, Alfred Adler, Peter Altenberg, Arnold Schoenberg, and Otto Weininger. See ibid, 153.

76. Ibid., 114–21.

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84. See Scheichl, S.P., “The Contexts and Nuances of Anti-Jewish Language: Were all the ‘Antisemites’ Antisemites?,” in Jews, Antisemitism and Culture in Vienna, ed. Oxaal, , Pollak, , and Botz, , 89–110.Google Scholar

85. See Janik, “Weininger and the Science of Sex.”

86. In his preface, Weininger acknowledges the disjointed nature of his text. Describing the two parts as, respectively, “biological-psychological” and “psychological-philosophical,” he concedes it might have been more appropriate to have published them as two separate works: one purely scientific and the other metaphysical (p. ix). He argues, however, that he had to “free” himself of biology before he could become a pure psychologist (pp. ix–x).

87. There is no substantive separation of scientific and extra-scientific discourse between the first and second parts. As examples, one may cite chap. 6 of part 1, which deals with feminism, and chap. 12 of part 2, dealing, among other issues, with medical views of hysteria. Such examples may be easily multiplied.

88. Historians of science and medicine have not analyzed this issue in any detail. See, however, Sulloway, Freud, 158–60; Moscucci, Ornella, The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England 1800–1929 (Cambridge, 1990), 13–22Google Scholar; and Hekma, Gert, “‘A Female Soul in a Male Body’: Sexual Inversion as Gender Inversion in Nineteenth-Century Sexology,” in Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, ed. Herdt, Gilbert (New York, 1994), 213–39.Google Scholar Thomas Laqueur's contention that males and females have been seen in modern times as totally different underplays the tense interplay of notions of sexual similarity and difference in nineteenth and twentieth-century biomedical discourse. Lawrence Birken provides a more nuanced and useful analysis of this issue. See Laqueur, Thomas W., Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar; and Birken, L., Consuming Desire: Sexual Science and the Emergence of a Culture of Abundance, 1871–1914 (Ithaca, 1988).Google Scholar

89. See Steenstrup, J.J.S., Untersuchungen über das Vorkommen des Hermaphroditismus der Natur, trans. Hornschuch, C.F. (Greifswald, 1846), 9–10.Google Scholar For an incisive critique of Steenstrup's ideas, see Leuckart, R., “Zeugung,” in Handwörterbuch der Physiologie, ed. Wagner, Rudolf, 4 vols. in 5 (Braunschweig, 1853), 4:707–1000, here 742–43.Google Scholar

90. The most concise and comprehensive discussion of Nägeli's multifaceted career is still that of Nordenskiöld, Erik, The History of Biology: A Survey (New York, 1928), 552–57.Google Scholar

91. See Nägeli, Carl v., Mechanisch-physiologische Theorie der Abstanmmungslehre (Munich 1894)Google Scholar; Gloria, Robinson, A Prelude to Genetics, Theories of a Material Substance of Heredity: Darwin to Weismann (Lawrence, Kansas, 1979), 109–30Google Scholar; and Hans-Jörg, Rheinberger, “Naudinn, Darwin, Nägeli: Bemerkungen zu den Vererbungsvorstellungen des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 18 (1983): 198–212Google Scholar, esp. 206–11.

92. Nägeli, Mechanisch-physiologische Theorie, 531.

93. Weininger does not completely reject contemporary research on the internal secretions but he refuses to recognize them as the sole determinants of sex. This moderate skepticism was shared by many contemporary medical scientists, who believed that the internal secretions of the sex glands acted on a congenitally determined sexual soma. The role of the sex glands, they argued, was important but secondary. As late as 1910, the eminent physiologist Artur Biedl devoted many paragraphs to a careful discussion of this question in his classic textbook of endocrinology. See Biedl, A., The Internal Secretory Organs: Their Physiology and Pathology, trans. Forster, Linda (London, 1913), 360–70.Google Scholar

94. Marshall, F.H.A., The Physiology of Reproduction, 2nd ed. (London, 1922), 690.Google Scholar It is ironic that Marshall criticized Weininger's views as “somewhat too morphologically conceived” and did not mention Weininger's ideas on the role of the internal secretions. There was a simple reason for this. Marshall seems to have been familiar only with the English translation of Ceschlecht und Charakter. Most of Weininger's endocrinological hypotheses were presented in long endnotes, all of which were omitted from the English version. Another British biologist, Edward A. Minchin, also found merits in Weininger's idioplasmic hypothesis of sex. See Minchin, E. A., “Protozoa,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911), 22:479–89Google Scholar, on 486.

95. Weininger claims that he had not seen Schopenhauer's passage when he “discovered the law” in early 1901. Acknowledging Schopenhauer's partial priority, he quotes him at length (489): “In the first place, all sexuality is partiality. This partiality or one-sidedness is more decidedly expressed and present in a higher degree in one individual than in another. Therefore in every individual it can be better supplemented and neutralized by one individual of the opposite sex than by another, since every individual requires a one-sidedness, individually the opposite of his or her own. Accordingly, the most manly man will look for the most womanly woman and vice versa.” See Schopenhauer, A., The World as Will and Representation, trans. Payne, E.F.J., 2 vols. (New York, 1966), 2:546Google Scholar. On Schopenhauer's analysis of sexuality, see Bernhard, Wolfram, “Schopenhauer und die modeme Charakterologie,” Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 44 (1963): 25–133,Google Scholar on 74–85. For a discussion of Weininger's “law” in the context of Schopenhauer's observations, see ibid., 79–85.

96. Surprisingly, Weininger does not emphasize his originality in framing human sexual attraction in algebraic terms. No biologist or medical sexologist of the time seems to have attempted anything similar. Ian Hacking has observed that in the nineteenth century, “the numbering of the world was occurring in every branch of human inquiry.” Weininger's law and equations, of course, have less to do with numbers than with a more general urge for quantification and mathematical expression. Nevertheless, they fall within Hacking's definition of laws: “Any equations with some constant numbers in them. They are positivist regularities, the intended harvest of science.” See Hacking, Ian, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1990), 60, 63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

97. See Bullough, Vern L., Homosexuality: A History (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Weeks, Jeffrey, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, 2nd ed. (London, 1989), 96–121Google Scholar; and Duberman, Martin Bauml, Vicinus, Martha, and George, Chauncey Jr.., eds., Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York, 1989).Google Scholar For the sake of convenience, I use the word “homosexuality” throughout as a generic term including homosexual acts, psychological orientation, and sexual preference. This does not reflect the complexities of nineteenth-century terminology and conceptualization, for a comprehensive review of which see Ellis, Havelock, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 2 vols. (New York, 1936)Google Scholar, vol. 1, pt. 4 (Sexual Inversion), 310–17. On emancipationist movements, see Lauritsen, John and Thorstad, David, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864–1935) (New York, 1974)Google Scholar; Steakley, James D., The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; and Fout, John C., “Sexual Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Male Gender Crisis, Moral Purity, and Homophobia,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 2 (1992): 388–41.Google ScholarPubMed On homosexual subcultures in Weininger's Vienna, see Hacker, Hanna and Lang, Manfred, “Jenseits der Geschlechter, zwischen ihnen: Homosexualitäten im Wien der Jahrhundertwende,” in Das lila Wien um 1900: Zur Ästhetik der Homosexualitäten, ed. Bei, Neda et al. (Vienna, 1986), 8–18.Google Scholar On medical theories of homosexuality in Central Europe, see Sulloway, , Freud, 277–319.Google Scholar

98. Physicians found it easier to jettison the idea of disease than that of anomaly. The eminent British sexologist Havelock Ellis, for instance, accepted that homosexuals were not diseased but denied that they were so unpathological as to constitute “an anthropological human variety comparable to the Negro or the Mongolian man.” Citing no less an authority than Rudolf Virchow, Ellis argued that any deviation from the norm was pathological, without necessarily being a disease. See Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 1, pt. 4, 321. Ellis's distinction between pathos (an anomaly, i.e., any deviation from the norm) and nosos (disease) was drawn from Virchow, R., “Eröffnungsrede, xxv. Allgemeine Versammlung und Stiftungsfest der deutschen anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Innsbruck vom 24.–28. August 1894,“ Correspondenz-Blatt der deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte 25 (1894): 80–87, here 84.Google Scholar

99. On this point, see Herzer, Manfred, Magnus Hirschfeld (Frankfurt, 1992), 98–99.Google Scholar

100. For a medical view approaching that of Weininger's, see Aletrino, A., “Uranisme et dégénérescence,” Archives d'anthropologie criminelle 23 (1908): 633–67,Google Scholar esp. 649–53. According to Ellis (Studies, 1, pt. 4, 321), Aletrino's position was quite singular among physicians and I have found no evidence to question that assessment.

101. See Rodlauer, ed., Otto Weininger, 173.

102. “Mein Mittel zur Bekämpfung der Homosexualität scheint Erfolg zu haben!! Trotzdem es ja zu meiner Theorie nur stimmen würde, habe ich mich doch von meinem Staunen darüber noch nicht erholt. Wenn ich nur sicher wäre, dass keine Suggestion vorliegt! … Jedenfalls werden die Dosen fortgesetzt werden müssen … Mein Patient bereitet sich schon auf den ersten Koitus vor!” See ibid., 73.

103. See LeRider, Der Fall Otto Weininger, 25–26.

104. Weininger's conception of “differential psychology” is his own, but he obtains the term from Stern, L. William, Psychologie der individuellen Differenzen, Schriften der Gesellschaft für psychologische Forschung 12 (1900).Google Scholar

105. Weininger would later argue that true psychology was not concerned with such empirical tasks. Here, however, he is still imbued with his initial conviction that the investigation of gender differences would lead to social reform.

106. In his notes to these passages, Weininger heaps praise on Wilhelm Fliess and his 1897 monograph, Die Beziehungen zwischen Nase und weiblichen Geschlechtsorganen. Weininger remarks that Fliess's “extraordinarily original treatise,” although inappropriately titled, contained the “most interesting and most stimulating” observations on periodic phenomena in human life, 499–500.

107. This opinion would not have seemed outlandish to contemporary physicians. Weininger himself says that his analysis, although completely independent, parallels that of Arduin, , “Die Frauenfrage und die sexuellen Zwischenstufen,” Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen 2 (1900): 211–23.Google Scholar Arduin believed that many of the leaders of the women's emancipation movements were masculine and lesbian, ibid., 216. These masculine women were biologically driven to masculine occupations and should be permitted to do so, ibid., 220–21. Arduin was the pseudonym of the physiologist and psychologist K. F. Jordan. See Gorsen, Peter, “Nachwort,” in Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen: Auswahl aus den Jahrgängen 1899–1923, 2 vols., ed. Schmidt, W. J. (Frankfurt, 1984), 2: 257–84,Google Scholar here 259.

108. Weininger quotes historian Jacob Burckhardt's statement that masculine intelligence and independence were prized features in women during the Renaissance, 88, 504. See Burckhardt, Jacob, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, ed. Günther, Horst (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 388,Google Scholar 434.

109. Lorenz, Ottokar, Lehrbuch der gesammten wissenschaftlichen Genealogie, Stammbaum und Ahnentafel in inter geschichtlichen, sociologischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Bedeutung (Berlin, 1898), 54–55.Google Scholar

110. If feminist movements are really caused by the birth of masculine women and feminine women in higher numbers during specific periods, then, Weininger points out, it follows that the current women's movement would disappear spontaneously and reappear again after many years (p. 91).

111. Darwin, Charles, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (New York, 1897), 2:26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

112. Weismann, A., The Germ-Plasm: A Theory of Heredity, trans. Parker, W.N. and Rönnfeldt, Harriet (New York, 1893), 363–64.Google Scholar

113. It was standard medical teaching at the time that women had a weaker sex drive than men. Weininger cites Alfred Hegar (Hegar, A., Der Geschlechtstrieb: Eine social-medicinische Studie (Stuttgart, 1894), 5–6)Google Scholar for support but the idea had been expressed much more vigorously by Richard von Krafft-Ebing: “Woman … if physically and mentally normal, and properly educated, has but little sensual desire … Her need of love is greater, it is continual not periodical, but her love is more spiritual than sensual.” See Krafft-Ebing, R.v., Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-Forensic Study, 12th ed., trans, anonymous (New York, 1939), 14.Google Scholar

114. Weininger links his views on female sexual passivity with that of Aristotle, whose theory of reproduction assigned the active role to the male principle and the passive role to the female. Weininger laments that Aristotle, like all Greek authors except Euripides, restricted himself to the reproductive sphere while discussing female sexuality (p. 240, 537).

115. “The male is only a male now and again, the female is always a female … everything reminds her of her sex.” See Rousseau, J.J., Émile, trans. Foxley, Barbara (London, 1992), 324Google Scholar. On the contexts of Rousseau's beliefs on gender, see Schwartz, Joel, The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chicago, 1984).Google Scholar

116. Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 6th ed. (New York, 1876), 119.Google Scholar

117. Weininger derives this argument from Havelock Ellis, who had suggested that women respond more readily to stimuli but men perceive stimuli with greater precision and intensity. Women were more “irritable,” while men were more “sensible.” Ellis had added that women might be less sensible because their senses are “habitually subject to a less thorough education.” See Ellis, H., Man and Woman: A Study of Human Secondary Sexual Characters (London, 1904), 148–49.Google Scholar Weininger ignores Ellis's qualification.

118. The difference between talent and genius, according to Weininger, is fundamental and qualitative. He rejects Cesare Lombroso's definition of genius as an extreme degree of talent (p. 521). See Lombroso, Cesare, The Man of Genius, trans, anon. (London, 1891), viii.Google Scholar

119. This protean ability, Weininger emphasizes, need not be simultaneous. Like masculinity and femininity in the same individual, the manifestations of genius might well be sequential.

120. Here, Weininger launches into a caustic attack on experimental psychologists who use “letters, long rows of figures, unconnected words” to test memory. He finds such experiments worthless because they place their subjects, regardless of their individuality, under the same experimental conditions and “treat them merely as good or bad recording devices (Registrierapparate).” People remember only what interests them, and different people are interested in different things. Psychologists who fail to take this elementary fact into account, Weininger suggests, do not really know anything about the mind (pp. 146–47).

121. The lack of clear consciousness and perfect memory, according to Weininger, is also responsible for women's deficiencies in creative imagination. Men, says Weininger, have traditionally regarded women as more imaginative solely on account of the female preoccupation with sexual fantasies (p. 151). Women succeed only in those imaginative arts, where vague and unformed sentiments could produce some small effect, such as painting, poetry, and pseudomysticism (p. 152).

122. Since she does not possess any moral sense whatever, Woman cannot be expected to act morally or he blamed when she did not (p. 252). Weininger reads the criminological literature of the late nineteenth century quite accurately and says that women commit fewer crimes than men. See Ellis, Man and Woman, 364–66; Lombroso and Ferrero, Das Weib als Verbrecherin und Prostituierte, 193–95. Many of Weininger's other beliefs on the relations between gender and criminality, however, are entirely his own. He says, for instance, that the male criminal never really feels his punishment is unjust. Criminals may be born with a “criminal drive” (verbrecherischen Trieb) but, despite all fashionable theories about moral insanity, male criminals are always conscious that they had demeaned themselves by their crime. Women criminals, on the other hand, are always convinced that they are in the right (p. 253).

123. On Kant's views on the origin of morality, see Sullivan, Roger J., Immanuel Kant's Moral Theory (Cambridge, 1989), 126–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

124. Weininger reminds his reader that this is not a novel contention; he has merely discovered the philosophical foundations of an old truism. The Chinese, he points out, had denied women a soul in ancient times, and the prophet Mohammed had barred women from paradise on similar grounds. In the Western tradition, Aristotle had used the word “soul” only for the active masculine principle, thus indicating that females had no soul (p. 240).

125. His anecdotal as well as confusing argument for this belief deserves to be quoted in full: “I know a large number of men who are psychologically almost completely female … I even know many women with masculine traits but not one woman who is not fundamentally female, even when this femininity is hidden by various means not just from others but also from the person herself. One is either man or woman, however many features of both sexes one might possess, and this ‘Being’ [Sein] … is determined by one's relationship with ethics and logic. While there are individuals who are anatomically men but psychologically women, there is no individual who is physically a woman but psychologically a man, regardless of external masculine traits” (p. 242).

126. See Freud, Sigmund and Breuer, Josef, Studies on Hysteria, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. Strachey, James (London, 1966), 2.Google Scholar On the history of medical concepts of hysteria, see Veith, Ilza, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago, 1965)Google Scholar; on the cultural contexts of medical concepts, see Micale, Mark S., Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton, 1995)Google Scholar; on the cultural importance of hysteria in Vienna, see Schneider, Manfred, “Hysterie als Gesamt-kunstwerk,” in Ornament und Askese im Zeitgeist des Wien der Jahrhundertwende, ed. Pfabigan, Alfred (Vienna, 1985), 212–29Google Scholar; and on the place of hysteria in Freud's work, see Andersson, Ola, Studies in the Prehistory of Psychoanalysis (Stockholm, 1962).Google Scholar Little work has been done on Weininger's reading of hysteria, but see Schuller, Marianne, “‘Weibliche Neurose’ und Identität: Zur Diskussion der Hysterie um die Jahrhundertwende,” in Die Wiederkehr des Körpers, eds. Kamper, Dietmar and Wulf, Christoph (Frankfurt am Main, 1982), 180–92.Google Scholar

127. Nevertheless, he adds, more women come close to being “absolute” Prostitutes than “absolute” Mothers (pp. 286–87). Nobody who has seen how modern women move around on the streets in clinging, form-revealing clothes would, he avers, consider this an exaggeration (p. 312).

128. Weininger dismisses all socioeconomic explanations of prostitution and follows Lombroso in attributing it to an innate disposition. In the extensive debates on prostitution in Central Europe around the turn of the century, most participants espoused either the biological perspective of Lombroso and Weininger or the sociological approach of the socialist leader August Bebel. See McCombs, Nancy, Earth Spirit, Victim, or Whore? The Prostitute in German Literature, 1880–1925 (New York, 1986), 44–49.Google Scholar

129. David Abrahamsen suggested, without providing any concrete evidence, that Weininger's negative portrayal of the maternal type may have been influenced by his relationship with his own mother. See Abrahamsen, Mind and Death, 10–11. Again, the biographical context cannot be self-sufficient. The maternalist orientation of Central European feminism is clearly crucial to Weininger's project.

130. This was an ancient idea, going back at least to Hippocrates. For a concise historical overview, see Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 2, pt 1, Erotic Symbolism, The Mechanism of Detumescence, The Psychic State in Pregnancy, 218–27. See also Huet, Marie-Hélène, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 1–123Google Scholar; and Stafford, Barbara Maria, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass., 1991)Google Scholar. On the popularity of the idea among German-speaking physicians, see Ploss, Hermann Heinrich and Bartels, Max, Das Weib in der Natur- und Völkerkunde: Anthropologische Studien, 4th ed., 2 vols (Leipzig, 1895), 1:614.Google Scholar

131. See Burkhardt, Richard W. Jr.., “Closing the Door on Lord Morton's Mare: The Rise and Fall of Telegony,” Studies in History of Biology 3 (1979): 1–21.Google ScholarPubMed

132. See Darwin, , Variation, 1:427–28, 432–33.Google Scholar Darwin's interest in telegony was part of his biological project of explaining the inheritance of variations. He attempted to explain telegony as well as other puzzling phenomena with his “provisional hypothesis of pangenesis.” August Weismann coined the term “telegony” but dismissed the concept because it challenged his distinction between the germ-plasm and the soma. See A.Weismann, Germ-Plasm, 385. Herbert Spencer's attacks on Weismann's ultra-Darwinism incorporated a fervent defense of the reality of telegony. See Spencer, H., “The Inadequacy of ‘Natural Selection,’” Popular Science Monthly 42 (1892–1893): 799–812;Google Scholar 43 (1893): 21–28, 162–73; and “Professor Weismann's Theories,” ibid., 43 (1893): 473–90. Weininger quotes Darwin and Spencer extensively.

133. See Carlson, Marvin, “Ibsen, Strindberg, and Telegony,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 100 (1985): 774–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In an early novel by Zola, for example, a woman has a child who does not resemble her husband but her first lover. The narrator reflects: “[Jacques] left behind him … a young woman stamped for ever with the mark of his kisses, possessed to such a point that she was no longer merely mistress to his body, but in herself bore another being, those male essences which had completed her and in that new shape consolidated her. It was a purely physical process at work … She was shaped, fashioned by the male, for all time … Her husband possessed merely her heart. Her body was no longer to be given, she could only lend it.” See Zola, Emile, Madeleine Férat, in Zola, Oeuvres complétes, ed. Mitterand, Henri, 15 vols. (Paris, 1966–1970), 1:683–903, on 812–13Google Scholar. The quotation is slightly modified from Madeleine Férat trans. Brown, Alec (London, 1957), 163–64Google Scholar, emphasis added.

134. The Father, in August Strindberg, Selected Plays, trans. Sprinchorn, Evert (Minneapolis, 1986), 163, 197Google Scholar. For an analysis of the personal and political motifs in the play, see GailFinney, Women in Modern Drama, 207–26.

135. This opinion was common enough in the wake of Bachofen's, Johann Jakob treatise, Das Mutterrecht: Eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur (Stuttgart, 1861).Google Scholar On the broader contexts of Bachofen's work, see Gossman, Lionel, “Basle, Bachofen, and the Critique of Modernity in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 47 (1984): 136–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Bachofen's work had influenced Friedrich Engels's 1884 work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and much of later marxist theory. On Bachofen's influence on later social thought, see Greisman, Harvey, “Matriarchate as Utopia, Myth, and Social Theory,” Sociology 15 (1981): 321–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burston, Daniel, “Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Bachofen's Influence on Psychoanalytic Theory,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 22 (1986): 666–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn, “Marxism and the Matriarchate: One Hundred Years after The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,” Critique of Anthropology 1 (1987): 5–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

136. See Ward, John, The Social and Religious Plays of Strindberg (London, 1980), 47–57.Google Scholar

137. For examples, see LeRider, Modernity and Crises of Identity, 165, 186, 291–92.

138. According to Weininger, communists, exemplified by Karl Marx, wish to abolish private property, whereas socialists encourage cooperation between individuals and recognize human individuality. Modern social democracy, Weininger complains, had retreated from the classical socialism of Owen, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Fichte due to Jewish influence (p. 410).

139. The Jewishness and femininity of the epoch had led to pervasive cultural degradation. Art had degenerated into “daubs,” and in literature, the cult of the madonna had been replaced by the cult of th e whore. Anarchy was rampant in political and social life. Nobody believed in the state or in the rule of law. Beguiled by historical materialism, the most foolish of concepts, historians believed they could explain the evolution of science, scholarship, and culture by changes in political economy. Psychiatrists saw genius as a form of insanity and the age had not produced a single great artist or philosopher (p. 441).

140. Sensuousness, Weininger clarifies, is not immoral because it is voluptuous. Asceticism, he emphasizes, is equally immoral. First, it takes a negative approach to the issue: a person is declared moral if he simply abandons the pursuit of pleasure. More importantly, the ascetic imperative comes from outside the individual, and is thus, in Kantian terms, heteronomous and not genuinely moral (p. 448).

141. Weininger compares the emancipation of women to that of Jews and Blacks. “Undoubtedly,” he says, “the principal reason why these people have been treated as slaves and inferiors is to be found in their servile dispositions; their desire for freedom is not as strong as that of the Indo-Germans.” But, despite the low worth of these groups, Weininger insists that right is “on the side of the emancipators” (p. 449). No matter how morally worthless, Jews, Blacks, and women are human and one must respect this humanity (p. 450). Since there is no Absolute Woman, all individual women, Weininger points out, possess at least faint traces of an intelligible self. He immediately adds, however, that women cannot be allowed to share political power: they must be excluded for the same reasons that children, the mentally handicapped, and criminals are excluded. Female influence can only be harmful to public welfare (p. 450).

142. See Schopenhauer, A., “Über Weiber,” in Arthur Schopenhauer: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Hübscher, Arthur, 7 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1972), 6:650–63Google Scholar; and Nietzsche, F., Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Kaufmann, Walter, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. W. Kaufmann (New York, 1968), 356–57.Google Scholar

143. See Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Kaufmann, , 359Google Scholar; Diethe, Carol, “Nietzsche and the Woman Question,” History of European Ideas 11 (1989): 865–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Booth, David, “Nietzsche's ‘Woman’ Rhetoric,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 8 (1991): 311–25.Google Scholar

144. In such an ethical utopia, there would, of course, be no reproduction, and the human species would soon be extinct. This objection, Weininger says, reveals a cowardly and irreligious lack of belief in individual immortality. Nobody with courage and true individuality, he says, could fear the loss of the body. Faith in the soul's immortality went hand in hand with individuality. “The rejection of sexuality,” he explains, “leads merely to the physical death of humanity and gives full play to the spiritual element of life … It follows, therefore, that it is not an ethical duty to ensure the continuation of the species.” Does anyone ever have coitus, he asks, out of concern for the future of the species?