Professor Ken Gemes
Otto Weininger, Women and Jews: How it all went Wrong

Professor Ken Gemes - Otto Weininger, Women, and Jews: How Could it Go Wrong?

- Okay, hello everybody and thanks Lauren and Wendy, and Trudy for organising all of this. Okay, so this is kind of the title of this lecture is Weininger, Women, Jews, How It All Went Wrong. The title is actually a kind of a bouncing off my previous Nietzsche lecture, which was Nietzsche, Germans, Jews, What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Next slide please, Lauren. Okay, so Otto Weininger, his years are 1880 to 1903 and he’s principally famous for this book called Geschlecht und Charakter, Sex and Character, which actually was a book he did from his PhD, I think he got his PhD in 1902 and the book was published in 1903 and it was a total cause célèbre, it was a sensation. In fact, in his day he was more read than Freud, at least for a while and actually funnily enough, I have relatives, my uncle, I mean he’s long dead who said “He remembers in the twenties how this was absolutely hot stuff.” Next slide please. Okay, so I want to contrast actually Weininger with Nordau cause Trudy has been talking about Nordau, Nordau is famous for this book Degeneration. But if you actually read the book, it’s a total rave. In fact, it is so bad. You know, he talks about people who are complete geniuses like Baudelaire, like Wagner, like Nietzsche and he just quotes them and “See this guy’s insane.” as if just the quotation is going to establish that. And in fact, the book was so over the top hysterical as George Bernard Shaw pointed out in his reply to it called “The Sanity of Art” that it actually bought the whole literature of degeneration into disrepute among serious-minded people. Wittgenstein is a different kettle of fish, he was taken seriously by heavyweights. For instance Freud thought very little of Nordau and particularly rejected his book Degeneration. Whereas Wittgenstein, Freud in some sense admired Weininger, I mean their admiration was limited.

And I’ll just quote a bit from Wittgenstein because there’s also cause I should point out, Wittgenstein was a Jew, obviously Freud’s a Jew, Wittgenstein was a Jew. And it’s interesting what Wittgenstein says here he says, I won’t read all of it. “I think there is some truth in my idea that I’m already only reproductive in my thinking. I think I’ve never invented a line of thinking, but it’s always been provided for me by somebody else.” And then he mentions various people, Boltzmann, Lutz, Schopenhauer Frege and Weininger. But it’s interesting for us because this idea that a Duke is only reproductive in their thought is a standard trope of anti-Semitic thought people like Wilhelm Marr and Hausman Stewards, Chamberlain said that. The one person who didn’t actually was Nietzsche and it’s funny how Wittgenstein a Jew imbibes this notion that a Jewish mind is reproductive. And Strindberg, the playwright claimed Weininger had quote “Solved the woman problem.” Freud in a footnote described into one of his works, described Weininger as highly gifted, but sexually deranged, often when I’m lecturing on Weininger, I tell my students, I’m one of those two. Freud actually had his doubts about Weininger. But the funny thing is, Freud had a friend called Fliess. and Flies was working on a book which was basically claiming about the fundamental bisexuality of all humans. And this is a fundamental notion in Weininger book and so Fliess got really angry with Floyd Freud cause he thought he’d leaked his idea to Weininger, which is absolutely not true at all, just a bit of gossip.

Next slide please, Lauren. Okay, so it’s important we understand some of the Kantian Background to what’s going on in Weininger. It so count there’s a basic separation between our faculty of reason, which is what separates us from the animals, that is we have it, they don’t. And our bodily inclinations, our desires, our passions and for Kant what is what is essential to us, who we really are. What he identifies the self with is the faculty of reason and Kant explain morality in terms of choosing to be governed by reason alone. When you are dictated to by reason or when you follow the dictates of reason, I should say, one is autonomous. And if you follow your reason properly and your reasoning is sound, you’ll act morally. But where you act under the influence of inclinations, passions, emotions and the like, he says “One is heteronomous and so one is then liable to act immorally.” So really for Kant, what it is to be autonomous is to be independent of that which comes from without outside your core self, which is your faculty of reason. Namely, your bodily inclinations is what is influencing you when you are being heteronomous. So for Kant as a rational being, your reason is what is truly you and your body is something separate from that essence. For many of the people who wrote about degeneration, this separation between reason and bodily inclination, it’s gendered. I’m not saying Kant wrote it this way, but that’s how some of his followers or people who were influenced him took it. They took abstract reason to be male and bodily inclinations to be female and you can see where this can lead to. So the moralities, matter of the male principle and immorality is a matter of the female principle.

Kant himself does not exhibit fear of the the body overwhelming reason. He’s very optimistic, so he rather celebrates this increasing domain of reason as we come more and more into enlightenment, as in his famous essay, “What is Our Enlightenment?” But degeneration were much more pessimistic and feared the faculty of reason becoming overwhelmed by the body. For instance, this is often expressed in people like Nordau as a fear that society is becoming feminised. You know there’s a big streak of misogyny on this kind of literature, we’ll see it’s totally realised in Weininger. Next slide, please. Okay, so Weininger did this thing where he claimed there’s a fundamental bisexuality to all people and he said every individual male and female contains portions of female and portions of male. So as a matter of practical fact, you never find a pure man or a pure woman, but only the male and female condition to a certain degree. So you can take A and B as designating two different individuals. And then he’d say individual A, who might be male might have alpha percent male and an alpha prime percent female or individual B say a woman might have beta percent female woman and and beta prime percent male. So just to give an example, we could think of an individual A, well, I dunno, male or female, it doesn’t really matter who is 80% male, but 20% female. The first part of his book, “Sex and Character,” which is actually very, very short. He treats these as physiological conditions and he even uses terms like plasma. But the second part of the book, which is a part that people really read the most and took seriously, he treats male and female, is psychological notions, so you can be psychologically 20% of female and psychologically 80% of male and that could be true by the way of a male or of a female. Next slide please, Lauren.

Okay, so Weininger, it takes this tack that he takes Kant to an extreme and he’s extremely misogynistic. I mean, he was famously misogynistic, which is so weird about Sternberg saying he’s solved the female problem and besides picking up Kant also picks up some of Aristotle. And he said, and I’m quoting here from his book “In procreation, the male principal was a formative agent. The logos that is reason while the female was a passive material, meaning the body.” And he talked about the notion of the absolute woman, which is for him a theoretical notion, ‘cause every actual woman has a certain percent of male and a certain percent of female. But an absolute woman, he actually says, lacks a soul. And he says, and this is a quotation from the book. “Everything indented is a quotation. The well-known phrase women have no character really means the same thing, personality and individuality, intelligible ego and soul will an intelligible character.” that’s terms borrowed from Kant. “All these are different expressions of the same actuality. In actuality, the male of mankind attained the female lacks.” He also has this theme, which is common to a lot of the degeneration literature and I’m going to point out later on, I’m going to show some paintings to show how this is reflected in art. That women are incapable of genuine language, a charge that was often brought against Jews in degeneration literature. “It is true that woman has the gift of speech, but she has not the art of talking. She converses flirts or chatters, but she does not talk. So women make sounds, but as if the sounds are meaningless and he says women are incapable of dealing with concepts.” Again, a quote from the book, “The absolute female then is devoid not only of logical rules, but the function of making concepts and judgments which depend on them.” Okay, next slide please. And I know this is extreme stuff, but what I want you to understand is this was absolutely hot stuff in Vienna at the turn of the century. I mean, Weininger was a superstar and you know to us it’ll, seems strange, but there is a point I want to get to you because you’ll end up seeing that he says things about women’s and he says things about Jews.

Extremely antisemitic even though he was a Jew, extremely misogynist and he is a fantasy, a fantasy about elimination and no one can seriously take the idea of eliminating women. But the other fantasy, well we know some people did take it seriously. So you know, yes, Weininger is extreme, but I want you to see that he was part of a body of thought that was quite accepted or disgusted his day. Okay, so I’ll do more about, you know his misogyny be over this soon. He talks about women not having any individuality, he says “The woman is always in living condition of fusion with all human beings she knows. Even when she’s alone, she’s not a monad.” This is a term taken from Liveness, a monad is a self sustaining individuality. For all men monads are sharply marked off from other existences, women have no definite individual limits. This is an idea, and it even goes back to Aristotle that in some sense women are shapeless because to have limits is to have a definite shape, is to have a definite characters. So he says “Females do not have an invisible centre.” again from the book, “The absolute female is capable of subdivision, the male even to the most complete character ology and the most acute experiment is always an indivisible unit. The male to the central nucleus of his being, which has no parts and cannot be divided. The female is composite and so can be dissociated and cleft, she doesn’t make a unity.” No, he was not married. I just noticed that in the questions, I’ll come back to the questions later.

And like Cesare Lombroso, Cesare Lombroso was this Italian criminologist, I mentioned him in some previous degeneration literature, Nordau’s book Degeneration, was dedicated to lombroso. So there’s this claim that a lot of the degeneration make that women have a natural inclination to prostitution. And as he says, “The disposition for an inclination to prostitution is as organic and woman as is the capacity for motherhood.” Next slide please. I think we have one more slide on his horrible misogyny and then I’m going to leave in it by going to some paintings. So in the end he says, “Mind cannot be predicated of her at all. Woman is neither high minded nor low minded, strong minded, nor weak minded, she’s the opposite of all these mind cannot be predicated of at of her at all, she’s mindless.” I’ll leave out the list. Oh no, I want to get this last part of this quotation cause it’s very important for the paintings we’re going to look at. Woman in close relation to.“ I think it is "Woman is in close relation to the flowers and the animals.” I’ll quote a bit more, “Woman has no relation to the whole world to God, is she then human or animal or a plant? As a matter of fact, women are sisters of the flowers and an enclosed relationship with the animals.” I think I’ll skip the rest. Let’s go on now, Laura, next slide. Okay, so now I’m going to look just 'cause you know, you could think this is just a one-off maniac. I mean, I’ve tried to explain to you that he was very popular and I mean he was a cool celeb in his day, people talked about him all the time. I mean, his death had something to do with that and I’ll come to that. But I’m going to show you certain paintings which capture these similar ideas about women having an affinity with flowers, with fauna, that women’s have this really belonged to the realm of nature as opposed to the realm of mind or spirit.

This was a common theme in a lot of turn of the century painting and actually also in 19th century painting, that women are often configured as a malign and even evil force. So what I want you to note is that what Weininger said literally and blatantly is actually expressed less directly and I would say actually with greater effective resonance by paintings and literature. So as I’m saying here, well, you know Weininger it today might strike us as derange. We should realise that related ideas are presented in less straightforward ways in much of a cultural heritage. So I’m going to look at a series of paintings now. Lauren, could you next slide. Okay, so this is from Segantini, famous Italian Swiss painter, “Vanity the Source of Evil.” And it is a very common theme in a lot of late 19th century painting and early 20th century painting that you see woman just as part of nature. You look how her hair mirrors the scene, how she’s the vanity is she’s looking at herself reflection. There’s a kind of autoeroticism, she’s kind of self obsessed. Next painting, please, Lauren. Okay, this is a very famous painting. It’s in the d'Orsay in Paris, 1886, Gustave Courbet “Woman with a parrot.” Remember that’s reference I say before, Weininger says, “Women don’t really have the art of speech.” Think about a parrot, a parrot is an animal that can talk, but it’s not really saying anything because mind cannot be predicated of at all. So this scene of woman and the parrot captures some of this, but also you should see, look at her flowing hair, look at the trees outside the floral motifs in the tapestry. It’s like woman is naturally naked, is naturally part of nature. So it’s all part of this rhetoric, that woman doesn’t belong to the world of the mind of the spirit of elevation of thought, but belongs to the body, to sexuality, there’s also the autoeroticism of her erect nipples. So it it equates women with a certain kind of base sexuality.

Next one, please, Lauren. Okay, so this is from 1896 Waterhouse “Hylas and the Nymphs.” This must be probably in some English music, maybe it’s in the Tate actually. And so what’s important is you see the women are naturally in the water, they’re naturally naked, they all look to same I might add they are not individuals. You see the flowers coming out of their hair and of course the story is a nymph drag Hylas to his death. So this this scene of woman identified with a body trying to drown the man in their world and naturally being equated with nature and flowers. Remember what Weininger says about women are more like animals and like flora, next painting. Okay, so these are almost comical. This is Lawrence Koe “Venus and Tannhauser. But the point is, you see tan Tannhauser looking towards heaven, looking to the words of spirituality in prayer and there’s a woman in the snake in the grass coming back to seducing back to the world of nature. So as I say these are common motifs. Next painting, please. Yeah, again, "The Temptation of Sir Perceval” in contemplation, thinking of the higher world and it’s almost like she’s a lion preying on her. But you also notice the floral motif in her clothing, the flowers springing out of her hair. Remember Weininger saying women are more in equation with the floral and the animal. You know these are things that are nicely conveyed and I actually say more effectively conveyed in paintings. But you can see these paintings and Weininger is saying it straight to your face, women are flowers and you think that’s crazy. But look at these paintings and think how they can put similar message in a much more subtle way or much more effective way. Next painting. Okay, so Maximilian Lenz, I think this is in some museum, Budapest “A World” Again, I like to think of him as a philosopher. You know, he’s not looking to a heavens, but he’s deep in contemplation.

And there we see these women’s like, you know Greek nymphs and dance and kind of a back in old dance or some such. But notice the flowers, they were amongst the flowers and the flowers actually growing out of them again. And they’re looking at him, he’s their prey to bring him back to the world of sensuality and nature. Whereas he’s a man would want to enter the world of the spiritual, next one. Okay, so just to show you some are actually transcended these dichotomies of women who has being part of nature, the evil and man being part of the spiritual, the good. Gustav Klimt, he indulges in some of this metaphoric, but as a genius, he tries to go beyond it. So a very famous scene in the Secession house in Vienna, the Gustav Klimt the Beethoven phrase from 1901, this panellist called the Hostile Forces. And yes, you know this belongs to the degenerationist of kind of thinking. You can see at the top there’s madness, sickness, and death. There’re the three women to the left of the Tifeo, the ape, the vicious ape with the snakes body, the gorgons and then these last figures to the right represent luxury, impotence and temperance. And they’re all configured as woman and also the ape known as well, actually I got the Italian here for some reason, Tifeo. The ape is a symbol of atavism and one of the parts about degeneration literature is they configure the degenerate as a atavistic, as a throwback to an earlier period. Man has kind of evolved that some have been left behind and often Jews and women are configured as degenerate, as atavistic. So this is Klimt indulging in some of that rhetoric, but let’s go to the next slide. The end of the Beethoven Freeze is “The Kiss” and this is Klint’s own words. “The Kiss is the Whole World.” That’s a heavenly choir on the left and we see the man and woman embracing.

So I think you know what’s to be said for Klimt is, Klimt while he was influenced by degenerationist ideas, in the end, his idea of hell is not a destruction or separation of the male and female, but a coming together a kind of higher unity, a sublimation, if you like. Next slide. And just, you know to draw the point also the one of his most famous painting from Klimt, “The Kiss” from 1909. You know I’m doing Klimt of course, 'cause he was also part of Vienna of the relevant period. Some people have said, “Well, yes, but look, the woman’s kneeling, her eyes are closed. A male is dominant, it’s not a genuine union.” But then let’s go to the next painting, please. He’ll notice it’s a male whose eyes are closed. It’s Adam and Eve, and it’s a woman who’s looking at us and engaging. So I think kind of Klimt well influenced by these degeneration ideas and configuring as woman is evil. The better Klimt speaks to a notion which is not so very keen of separating the good and evil, but of a higher unity, the more healthy thought, something that wasn’t available to someone like Weininger as we’ve all seen. Next slide please. Okay, so Weininger of course didn’t just write on women notoriously he wrote about Jews. Interestingly, just like he configures being male and female is ultimately psychological types. He considers being a Jew as being a psychological type, not as a race or a religion. He says, “I must however, make clear what I mean by Judaism. I mean neither a race nor a people, nor a recognised cree. I think of it as a tendency of the mind as a psychological constitution, which is a possibility for all mankind, but which has become actual in the most conspicuous fashion, only amongst the Jews. So just like a physical male can be 80% female, someone who’s not born into the Jewish faith could be 80% Jewish.”

As a matter of fact, most females, physiological females, according to Weininger, have a very high percentage of the female. And he would say, “As a matter of fact, most people who are born Jew into a Jewish faith have a high percentage of Jew.” But there could be people who are born Jewish, who have a very low percentage of Jews and there could be people who born as non-Jews have a high percentage of Jews. The interesting thing about Weininger is he makes his very explicit congruity between Jews and women and one of the things he says is that Jews like women, they don’t have humour, they have mockery. He says “The Jew, who does not set out like the humorous from the transcendental.” this is Kantian a notion of getting above this world to a higher world of thought and does not move towards it. Like the erotic has no interest in depreciating what is called the actual world and that never comes before him in the paraphernalia of a juggler, in the nightmare of a mad house, humour because it recognises a transcendental if only by the mode of resolutely concealing it, is essentially tolerant. Sato on the other hand, is essentially intolerant and is congruous with a disposition of the Jew and the women.“ The first part of that is hard to pass, but the most thing I want you to see is this equation he has between the Jew and the women. Jews and women are devoid of humour, but addicted to mockery. Next slide please. Okay, so the congruity between Jews and women. So remember I said before that there’s this notion that women have no definite shape. You know they’re the visible, they don’t have a core, they’re not monads boring Liveness’s term, this is also something that’s echoes from Aristotle. So he says, "Jews like women are adaptable of no contact with ultimate reality.”

That is the transcendental. Remember, Kant divided the world to the world of appearances and the transcendental and he treats the transcendental beyond the world of appearance as the real world. Kant would refer to it, the world of things in himself. So Weininger, “The congruity between Jews and women further reveals itself in the extreme adaptability of the Jews, their lack of deep-rooted in original ideas.” Recall Wittgenstein another Jew saying of themself, there’s nothing originary in me, which is ridiculous given how brilliant Wittgenstein was. In fact, the mode in which like women, because they are nothing in themselves, they can become everything. The Jew is an individual, not an individuality, is in constant relation with a lower life and has no share in the higher metaphysical life. Now again, this is the overblown Kantian terminology. By the way, this book Geschlecht und Charakter, Sex and Character, the base of it was actually a PhD thesis, I think he got his PhD in 1902, Geschlecht und Charakter was 1903. And Sex and Character is basically an extension of his PhD. So Weininger follows Kant in separating that which is merely phenomenal, that belongs to the world of appearances from that which is transcendental, which is beyond the world of appearances. Someone like Nietzsche would say all this talk about beyond the world of appearances, it’s a kind of an echo of Christianity. Christianity has heaven above this world. Well, Kant has the world of things in itself, which is the real world, for Nietzsche it’s all a slandering of this for each of the one and only world. Okay, so there’s a separation of the two. But what Weininger does is he really genders these, he genders these by claiming that the absolute woman exists only in the world of appearances, whereas man can reach the transcendental, the metaphysical. I want to be very clear, this is not something Kant himself says at all.

You know, Kant who may himself have been a misogynist and may have himself been an anti-Semite, he was actually a force for a certain kind of universalism because he said every human, male, female, Jew, non-Jew, they all have a dignity because they all have a faculty of reason. So it’s one thing what Kant said, it’s one thing what Kant himself personally was and it’s another thing what other people like Weininger made of Kant. There’s also this theme in Weininger that women in Jew are shape shifters. You know as I say, they don’t have a soul, they don’t have a definite shape, Aristotle would say the same about women too. “The woman is material which passively assumes any form impressed upon it, in the Jew adapts himself to every circumstance in every race becoming like the parasite.” You know, that terminology got taken up horribly. You know by subsequent people involved in degeneration literature, “A new creature in every different host always remaining essentially the same.” Interestingly enough, there’s a lot to be said about that, but I won’t say it now. Next slide, please, Lauren. Okay, so Weininger how I say we are not alone. So, I want to emphasise that, you know it’s easy for us to think of Weininger as as totally nutso. But these themes were themes that were around, for instance, this congruity between Jews and women. There are other thinkers, brilliant thinkers who had that, Freud had that to a certain extent. For instance, Freud argues that both the Jew and the woman represent the castrated. Women 'cause they don’t have a penis, because Jewish men have circumcised and interestingly, Freud argued, I’m not saying I endorse this argument in any way, that the basis of both anti-Semitism and misogynism is because in the male mind we have this fear of a castration, and we project that we throw it out of ourselves onto Jews and women who for us represent the castrated.

And interestingly, the funny thing is Freud diagnosed Weininger, antisemite misogyny in terms of this projection of fear of castration. But the funny thing is, Freud himself has similar prejudices. For instance, Freud famously claimed that because women don’t have the same degree of castration anxiety for an obvious reason, nothing to lose. They don’t form a full super ego and hence a morally deficient, 'cause Freud had this idea that the male child wants to possess its mom and wants the mom exclusively, that the dad is a countervailing force. And it’s so scared of the dad, you interject the father and that becomes a moral sensor, and especially this idea that the father will punish you for your desire for your mum by cutting it off. And so Freud has this whole theory that because females don’t have castration anxiety, they don’t interject the father, but if they don’t interject the father, that’s the basis what he called the super ego, which is the basis of morality. Hence, Freud claims women are morally deficient. But he also says in a different book, he says of Jews, Freud says, “It’s because they refuse to acknowledge the killing of the totem father.” This is his theory, that there was original Moses who was killed by the tribe, that they are developmentally backward. So Freud in some sense says both Jews and women are atavistic. Now in that sense, he shares something with Weininger there. This idea that the Jews don’t accept the killing of the totem father is Freud contrasts that in that book Moses and Monotheism with Christianity, which at least in saying that Christ was killed and Christ you know is the Father three and one, he thinks that’s a screen memory of a killing of a totem Father with the Jews don’t acknowledge, hence the Jews atavistic and morally backwards. Not endorsing, I’m just saying that Freud travels in similar circles. So as I say, these are all in Freud’s word. In Freud, we see these echoes of the degeneration claims that women and Jews are atavistic. As I say, Max Nordau, who wrote the famous book, Degeneration, argued that modern society had become feminised and this was a common theme that somehow the Jew represented the feminine.

I mean, you see that identification in Weininger and we’ve already spoke, I think Trudy, we already mentioned the notion of Muskeljude, muscular Jews or something called muscular Judaism. And this was this idea endorsed by some Jews like Max Nordau themselves, that Jews by being ruthless, cosmopolitans, had become feminised. And that’s why he thought the counter with this idea of the Jews should go back to the land, that could be the Muskeljude, the muscle Jew. Next slide please, Lauren. Okay. Hmm. The slide didn’t come up for me. Okay, so Weininger actually did claim there was a fundamental difference between women and Jews. He says, “We’ve now reached the fundamental difference between the Jew and the woman. Neither believe in themselves, but the woman believes in others in her husband, her lover or her children, or in love itself. She’s a centre of gravity, though it is outside of her own being other words, she’s not autonomous, self-contained. The Jew believes in nothing within him or without, he’s wanted desire for permanent landed property and his attachment to the movable goods are more than symbolical.” Okay and there’s also an identification of modernity with the feminine Jew. He says, “Our age is not only the most Jewish, but the most feminine.” Interestingly, Nordau, our while not saying our age is the most Jewish, Nordau makes this same claim that our age is fundamentally an age of the feminine, it’s an age of what he call hysteria. One of the interesting about Weininger besides this, obviously Jewish self-hatred, is he actually makes it, the diagnosis that Jewish hatred is based on projection.

The idea of that there’s something you can’t stand in yourself, so you try to localise it and push it out to someone else. And he says in a quote from his book, it’s probably the only true sentence in the whole book, “Whoever detested Jewish disposition, to test it first of all in himself, that he should persecuted in others merely his endeavour to separate himself in this way from Jewishness, he strives to shake it off and to localise it in his fellow creatures and for a moment to dream himself free of it. Hatred like love is a projected phenomena that a person alone is hated, who reminds one unpleasantly of oneself. Isn’t a deep theory, the projective theory of anti-Semitism worth a whole lecture. Next slide please. Still doesn’t come up with my screen, I dunno if everyone’s okay. So I’ve called this problem before, I noticed someone else in the, in some of the chat said, "Oh, the Jews are meant to be weak. The Jews are meant to be out atavistic, but how come they’re the ones who survive?” You know, the Greeks are gone, the Babylonians have gone, the Romans have gone, the Syrians have gone, the Egyptians have gone, but the Jews remain, and yet they’re meant to be atavistic and primitive and backward, they’re the unfit ones. So in my classes, I call this a survival of the Unfitest Problem. And Weininger realises that, he realise paradox generated by the claimed Jews are inferior, coupled with the evidence that they’ve survived. And his non-answer is quote, “That Jews produced the greatest example of self overcoming in the case of Jesus.” Weininger conjectures “The Jews remain because it is their metaphysical meaning to produce the founders of religion.” As quote from his book, “The possibility of begetting Christ is the meaning of Judaism.”

I must say in all of this, is historians of Judaism point out this, Blinkincop in his famous book says, now this is the question, “How come the Jews survive, while everyone else goes.” The one people who have an answer actually. Some Orthodox Christians claimed that the Jews remain as an example of a downtrodden people, well worked till the original of Israel, that was one answer that was at least had made some sense. Okay, so I want to say “The Survival of the Unfitest Problem,” it’s a common feature of degeneration of theories, namely that they maintain that the degenerates are inferior, and often in Nordau he claimed that they tend towards sterility. But they combine this with a claim that there’s a danger of the population being swamped by these degenerates. It’s kind of the incoherence of the degeneration literature that it says, “Look, these generations naturally tend towards sterility, and yet they’re going to swamp us and overtake us. And you see that kind of hysteria, especially in Nordau’s book Degeneration. Next slide, please, Lauren. Okay, so yeah. So there’s is identification of modernity with the feminised Jew. Weininger says, "Our age is not only the most Jewish, but the most feminine.” And I see there too Weininger converted to Catholicism. That is not right, he converted in 1903, maybe it was 1902 to Protestantism. But you can think of him as, he saw being Jewish and being a woman as psychological types. So you might surmise that even though he’d converted to Protestantism, his greatest fear was, waking up on morning discovery that he was a Jewish woman, you know so much aligns Jew and the woman as being, you know being of the body and not being of the logos of the spirit of the mind of the higher, so he had a nice solution to it. At age 23, he shot himself in the building where Beethoven died.

You know, like a lot of these people, Beethoven was an absolutely revered figure as a figure of high culture. And in fact, one of the reasons his book was so, you know became an overnight sensation was because of this spectacular suicide. I might also add Nordau wrote a review of it, which also helped bring it into the public attention. Okay, so Weininger solved the problem of waking up to be discover you’re a Jewish woman in his own person through the use of the God, but what about the rest of us? Well, he had a pretty good solution to that too. He said, “Look, we should stop procreating, and then in one generation we’re free of Jews and we’re we’re free of women bodies, they’ll be gone, but men as pure souls will continue.” Yeah, okay, I know this sounds seriously insane. But look, the important point is, at the time, this was not considered insane. I mean, there were some who wrote critical stuff about Weininger and Freud, despite the calling him brilliant, but sexually deranged actually wrote some fairly critical stuff about Weininger or made critical comments about Weininger, but it was very seriously discussed at the time. And one thing I really want to get over to you is this fantasy where women are characterised as essentially atavistic of the body as dragging us down from the spiritual, the same is true of the Jew. Now besides Weininger, you can’t seriously entertain the possibility of getting rid of the all the women, you know a generation later, there were a lot of people who did unfortunately as we know, seriously entertained the possibility of getting rid of the Jew. So I kind of impress upon you that to us today, some of these ideas seem absolutely crazy, but these ideas repeat themselves in various ways. They may not be stated so blatantly as they are in Weininger, that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to show you those paintings. But some of this rhetoric comes across, I mean you see tones of this rhetoric, for instance in the way foreigners are often nominated, certain people refer to foreigners as rats or as parasites, et cetera. Those metaphoric are still with us, you shouldn’t think this is all something of long ago Vienna. This had this kind of thinking, had horrible consequences and parts of it is still with us today, both regarding both Jews, women, foreigners, myriad of others, I’ll end there.

• [Judy] Do you want to take some questions? We’ve got quite a few.

• Yeah, I can look at those.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: “Are we to understand that we all possess a faculty of reason?”

A: Okay, so for Kant absolutely, yes. All humans have a dignity of a faculty of reason and are therefore worthwhile. Therefore, they must be treated as a members of what can’t call the kingdom of ends. That is why Kant, even though himself personally was a bit of a anti-Semite and arguably a bit of a misogynist, that’s actually less clear, his thought was genuinely emancipatory. With Weininger he says, “Look, there is no absolute female, any physiological female contained, 'cause he’s talked about the fundamental bisexuality of the all humans. As a matter of fact, physiological females tended to have a low percentage of male, which means they had a low percentage of reason. But he said any female would have some degree of reason was he married the suicide prevented marriage, I’d suppose. Wait, I missed that one though.

Oh, wow. "So many women, today would be thrilled to murder him.” a sick men who would agree with him. Well, you know incels and people like that, yeah yes

Q: “How does he justify that he comes from a woman?”

A: You know we were put on earth? Look, there’s this Manichaen notion and what Christianity officially repudiated Manichaeism, folk Christianity is riddled with Manichaeistic notion, by the way I should say there’s some of it in capitalistic Judaism. The notion of the Shekinah, oh, actually I won’t go there, but let me go to the Christian version of it. The Christian Manichaeis notion is there’s a spirit a soul that is kept, which is something good coming from heaven, coming from God, which is kept in gross matter, which is something foul and evil. not the official position of the church, that can’t be the official position because God created bodies, so they can’t be evil in themselves. But folkish Christianity often tells it that way. So yeah, as the body comes from the mother, the spirit may comes from elsewhere in the extreme view.

Okay, “I suspect that there is an element of Weininger his misogyny in maleness in general. Fear of women, fear of the temptation. Women represent fear of man’s inclination that he can displace onto woman.” I got to say, Ryan, I’m pretty sympathetic to that. And I mean, Freud tells the story that males have this incredible fear of castration, which then they project onto women. You know, I’m not so big on Freud’s. I mean Freud’s a genius, and I love reading it, I don’t believe much of it at all. But the idea of projection, yeah, I would mind put it, look to put it less, you know dramatically than Freud could say, men for centuries have been the ones in power for thousands of years. And women for many men represent objects of desire and desire is disruptive in a certain way, desire can throw you out of your world, so to speak. You might be wanting to do something that finds your desire overwhelming you and maybe fear of one’s own desire said in a male voice is projected onto women’s poor women are victims of men’s kind of self-hatred to a certain extent.

“Watch out the witches.” Sandy Lesner. I always wonder if that’s a relative 'cause the Lesner relatives in America.

Q: “What was his childhood like?”

A: Actually, I didn’t know much about his childhood.

Q: “Was he gay?”

A: Look, a lot of people claim he was a repressed homosexual, who knows?

Wait a second. “He sounds like Wagner.” About the Jews, yes. Look, a common notion to degeneration of literature is, are Jew is identified with material with the body, which is seen as disruptive of the spiritual, that is exactly Wagner’s approach. So yes, in that sense he was very much like Wagner.

“Well, why did he gain so much fame.” spectacular suicide in Beethoven’s house will do it, but he was also topical. Some of these ideas were around as I’ve tried to express they were around in painting. The female problem, the woman problem was much discussed as were the Jewish problem and he was addressing these so-called problems. But the suicide, you know like James Dean, James Dean’s suicide or Marilyn Monroe’s death did a lot for their fame, well that did a lot for Weininger.

Q: “Was the guy on psychedelics?”

A: I don’t think he was a drug taker.

Oh yeah. Above my pay grade, it’s not true. But yeah, there’s some people have written . Oh, so many paintings you can see of this period, you can see elements of misogyny.

Q: “Didn’t the Catholics regard woman as evil influence as a tendency become monastic and avoid women?”

A: Look, the official position of the church is that bodies, as I say, are created by God and a sense there is nothing evil. Evil does not come from our bodies, God’s creation. It comes from our free will and our misuse of our faculty of free will, that’s the official position. But a lot of folk, as I say, a lot of folk Christianity, whether in Protestant terms or Catholic terms, is much more manichaeistic and sees women as part of the body as a negative evil influence, not the official Catholic line.

Ooh, “Did Freud not shift his perspective on the castration complex?” These are jumping, unfortunately. Well, it’s mainly that essay on some psychological differences attended upon the anatomical differences in the sexes, which is quite a late essay. So I think he kept up castration anxiety to the end, as far as I know. In fact, it wasn’t in the early Freud, it’s more of the later Freud. The emphasis on the transcendentally he described. “It’s nothing more than self-congratulation. Any perceptive reader other than those who are also insecure as to need to join in a better than new cohort should be able to see right through the egocentricity.” Yeah, the transcendental is many, many different uses. As I say, for Kant wasn’t using it for antisemitic or misogynist reasons, because he thought all humans are capable of the transcendental 'cause they all have the faculty of reason. I mean, some don’t use it as much as others in admittedly, but we all have it potencia. I’ll tell you what, let me use Nietzche take, Nietzche thinks all of this talk about the transcendental is done out of resentment and hostility towards this world, it’s like people feel weak and disempowered in this world, so they invent a substitute world, the world of heaven, the world of things in itself, Plato’s worlds of form. So Nietzche diagnosis is all this talk of the transcendental is an expression of what he called Resetimo, this the one and only world.

Oh boy, I see someone, “I hate the phrase the Jew as as in one Jew with every Jew. It speaks the essentialism, the core of racism.” Yeah, quite agree.

Q: Sheri Singer, “The history of the 20th century should prove once and for all the degeneration of human beings, particularly men. After all, men possessed the power, where did that get us?” a: Yeah, I’m sympathetic. You know, I take some solace that women, you know we all dwell on the horrible things. We dwell on the Trumps and the Johnsons and horrible stuff like that. But one thing to be said, Pinker talks about this kind of stuff in the better angels of our nature. That in our century, the 20th century and the 21st century, we’ve seen a huge change of balance of power towards women and power to it I say. Like the fact that in the Scandinavian countries and the parliaments, there’s such a high percentage of women, can’t be a bad thing.

Q: “What would Weininger a say about Eve’s influence of Adam in the Garden of Eden narrative? Any comments about the snake?”

A: Eh, I’m thinking of his other, not Geschlecht, not in Sex and Character, but you know, I think he’d think there’s some fundamental truth in that story that Eve being, you know of the sensual body, you know is the one who corrupts Adam, who’s a male who could be of the mind.

Okay, Timothy writes, “George Samson woke up today and found himself turns into a cockroach.”

Q: Kaska, “Do you see any influence of Otto Weininger?”

A: Look I’ve never done this, I’ve never actually checked on Kaska and Weininger, but the chances that Kaska did not know a Weininger would be calculal at zero. There is just no way someone in France’s Kaska’s circles wouldn’t have known about Weininger. But of course, it’s a man being transformed into a cockroach, not a woman. You know, I don’t know enough about misogyny in Kaska. I mean look, you know Kaska is, you know shades so much more subtle than Weininger on this thing. You have to read his report to the academy, which is about an ape who learns to speak proper German so that his captors will accept him. And of course, it’s all a reference to Jewishness because Jews live amongst Germans, but aren’t really accepted. But if we can learn to assimilate it, we can learn to speak proper German, maybe these people will treat us with a modicum of decency. So, Kaska’s more subtle on these questions than Weininger.

Q: A Betty Lowenstein, “He committed suicide at 23, he could not have had much life experience, even if he is read widely, how could he be taken so seriously, even his own time?”

A: Well, things are changing, there’s the industrialization of the 19th century, the world is radically changing, ideas are radically changing. You know there’s a time that, people were unsettled in a terrible way at the turn of the century, and people were looking for answers and this guy provides radical answers.

Yeah, I know it’s hard. Look, it is hard for us and that’s why I wanted to go to those paintings to show you that these ideas are not just one man’s fantasies, these were shared ideas. Okay, in Nietzsche I see now. This certainly helps to clarify the monumental struggle women have experienced throughout the 20th century to attain some sort of respect and equality in all aspects of life, and work vis-a-vis man.“

Yeah, misogyny is so, so deep, you know antisemitism deep misogyny, I would say even deeper in a certain way. So, yeah, you know climbing out of that hole, God knows how long it’s going to take us.

Q: iPad, "Is there any difference between the acceptance of Weininger to the acceptance of conspiracy theories now?”

A: Yeah, okay. Conspiracy theories are being accepted by a large amount of people, especially in America. What really interesting about Weininger is how super brilliant people like Wittgenstein and Freud took him seriously. You know, a lot of these conspiracy theories now traffic among, you know not people greatly intellectually endowed. No, there are some, intellectually endowed who do fall in with them, I’ll admit. But, Weininger was hot stuff among, Sternberg, Ford, Maddox. Ford was discussing him, Conrad was discussing him, highbrow intellectuals were taking Weininger very seriously.

Q: “Are there other philosophers who really agreed with Weininger?”

A: Yeah, mainstream philosophy didn’t take Weininger that seriously. He was more part of the, cool critics took him seriously. Actually, Carl Krause was pretty critical of Weininger. But Carl Krause was critical of Freud and just about, and Nordau everyone else.

“I wonder what he thought of the Virgin Mary.” Good point, yes. Hmm, I don’t know of anything that he wrote about the Virgin Mary. Where are we now?

Q: “Was finding her influenced by Strauss’s opera Salome?”

A: You know, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was, but I just don’t have that information.

Q: “Did Hitler read him?”

A: Eckhart, Dietrich Eckhart, who’s kind of Hitler’s mentor, he thought he thought of Weininger as a one good, honest Jew Hitler. It’s very hard to know what Hitler read, he was such a gadfly in his reading, and he read bits and pieces of all different kinds of stuff. Like Hitler had a very spotty knowledge of Nietzsche. There’s no doubt that Hitler would’ve known of Weininger and he probably would’ve heard from Dietrich his famous nod, you know Weininger was a one self truthful Jew.

“James Dean died in a motor.” Yeah, no, I didn’t say James Dean committed. Oh, no, maybe I did say James Dean committed to the suicide. Sorry, that would’ve been my mistake. I mean, What I meant about James Dean of Marilyn Monroe is that, you know they had spectacular deaths at their height when they were young, and that added a lot to their fame. Yeah, was he delusional? Yeah, a lot of people are delusional.

Q: Jeremy Klein, “To what extent were these ridiculous ideas? Nonetheless, somehow explanatory of society around 1900, after all women had less education, less economic status, et cetera. Was there any way in which they were sort of bounded rational in their historical context?”

A: I’m not sure what to make about the last point. I thought, I think women were rational then as they are now. Like, don’t accept any of this stuff about women representing unreason, this is all some kind of horrible fantasy that was very widespread. But these ideas are explanatory, that’s part of the reason we study them. The reason I dwell so much on the degeneration literature is it’s so easy to think of what happened in the Holocaust is pure evil as an anomaly and that is a very, very wrong thought, it has a history, it has a genesis. A lot is to be laid down to horrible economic conditions and the horrible Versailles treaty and stuff like that and the great inflation. But it was also a period of I ideas and you know Weininger add to those ideas. You know, I say this all the time that, you know I make this joke that Trump is just an opportunist, whereas Hitler was an idealist. You know Hitler was an idealist. Yeah, I mean Hitler had ideas, horrible ideas, but he was moved by ideas. And Weininger is one of the people who contribute to these ideas.

Q: “Well, what is his role in the historical context?”

A: Well, that’s what I’m trying to get at.

“Another era, another expression of hatred of the other in modern jargon, scapegoat.” Yeah, as I say, I’m somewhat prone to these projective theories of hatred that there are parts of ourselves we can’t accept and we project onto others, but I’m sure there are many other routes to it too.

“Hitler’s Favourite Jew recent book called Hitler’s Favourite Jew.” I dunno anything about that. I’ve heard that expression used, but I don’t know the book, I’d be interested to know if there really is such a book.

“Otto Weininger was a relative named after this Weininger.” Okay, I didn’t know this other Otto Weininger.

“Non Jew to Jew, I’m addicted to oppressing you and I’ll blame and hate you for my addiction.” Yeah, okay. Similar to this Jew woman parallel you have described, yeah. It’s basically the blame game is Weininger talking about himself. Well, you know that’s what Dietrich Eckhart said that Weininger was talking about himself and all Jews.

“I love the colours in your room.” It’s actually my wife’s room, I have to borrow her study. She’s a scholar of Buddhism because everywhere else in the house, the internet doesn’t work.

“Probably too late to comment. But it is not possible that as woman had been hidden in the home and very covered up until this point, that men were having difficulty accepting the emergence of women into the public and beginning to show more flesh as well.”

Okay, so there’s a whole literature in what is called the New Woman and you see this wonderfully encoded in Dracula. There’s the by Bran Stoker. There’s Mina, the good woman who is saved from vampirism, who’s willing to be domestic and married Jonathan and have children. And there’s Lucy, who’s a new woman who is free in her sexuality and she becomes a vampire who has to be killed. So there’s this notion of, you know the 19th century, the beginning of the women’s emancipation movement, women demanding a place in the public sphere and men being threatened by that and hence demonising it. So yes, very much part of that. That was part of the fear of women seeking power and seeking expression.

Q: “What would Weininger think of the increasing number of transsexual women coming out of the closet?”

A: Ah, have no idea. You know I’m an academic. We can’t possibly talk about transsexual without me losing my job. You know, it’s such a minefield these days, I have no idea what he would think.

“Weininger would probably turn in his grave if he knew the Lockdown University was run by ladies, Wendy, Judy, Lauren and so on.” Yeah, who knows? “Even the Jewish religion, women never educate or allowed to join in prayer.” Yeah, the deep issue about misogyny and Judaism itself, that would be another topic.

Q: “Do you have any idea of his early and middle childhood rearing?”

A: No. Yeah you know, if you’re interested in this kind of thinking, there’s a woman, what’s her name? Oh, Alice Miller. I don’t think she wrote about Weininger, but she wrote about Kaska, she wrote about Hitler and she’ll all go back to questions about child abuse being mental child abuse, not physical child abuse as the root of all these pathologies. I have my suspicions about that, but if you are interested in that kind of thinking about how we can trace these kind of malevolent thoughts to a certain kind of mental or physical child abuse, the person to go to is Alice Miller, “The Drama of the Gifted Child.” And she wrote a million other books on the same topic where she said it’s all some kind of childhood abuse, this is all a reflection of it. Okay, looks like we’re done with questions.

• [Judy] I think that’s it. Thank you so much for another incredible lecture, Ken and we’ll see you soon.

• See you soon everyone, thanks for your questions. Bye now.

• [Judy] Bye.