No More Learning

The road led him to fantasies of suicide, which he finally
acted out.
A good deal has already been said about the symbols and
the meaning of the "Letzte Aphorismen. " These are written in
Weininger's very heart's blood. In them we can see the emo-
tional expression of his psychological structure. At the same
time they show his complete abandonment of two of his most
important principles: his belief in the individual and his
hatred of women.
"Ego does not exist," he wrote (U. L. D. , p. 175), "soul does
not exist; goodness is the only absolute perfect reality, and it
includes all separate things: Individuality is the result of van-
ity: we need an audience, we wish to be seen. A vain person
also takes an interest in others and understands them. " Else-
where we find this passage: "Man's first fall was caused by his
individuality, and the symbol of individuality is the shooting
star. " And in Taschenbuch (p. 42), we read: "The mirror is
the surrogate for creating one's self. The mirror has a relation-
ship to vanity and to individuality as well. . . . The problem
of individuality is the problem of vanity. The reproduction of
life is the consequence of vanity. The criminal is vain because
he wants loneliness. "
Such words are directly opposed to what he had written a
few months earlier in Sex and Character. They disrupt a fun-
damental principle on which he had built his life and his
theory--individualistic intellectualism.
In abandoning his belief in the ego and the soul he gave up
two concepts that had been deeply significant to him, and his
belated disbelief in individuality also disturbed his deep-rooted
faith in immortality. These changes were alarming symptoms.
His moral masochism led him to attempt the annihilation of
the individual self, in order to overcome his loneliness. At the
same time he tried to become part of a larger, more powerful
whole outside himself. When he said, "goodness is the only
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? 180 Genius and Insanity
absolute perfect reality," he was seeking to make himself part
of a larger pattern in which, as participant in a glorious un-
dertaking, he could feel strong and eternal. He submerged
himself in a greater unity that would shelter him and give him
new security. He sought to become a living part of the phe-
nomena about him. His masochistic strivings opened for him
an escape, a means of leaving his conflicts behind him. And
his trend to a faith in a larger whole even went so far as mys-
tical interpretation of time. "In Syracuse I can only be born
or die, but not live," he wrote, and his declaration showed that
for him time and space were fused.
On the problem of woman his views also underwent radical
alteration. In Taschenbuch (p. 24) he wrote: "How can I re-
proach woman for doing nothing but wait for the man? The
man wants nothing else. There is no man who would not be
happy in knowing that he had sexual attraction for a woman.
The hatred of women is nothing but the hatred of sexuality
which he has not yet conquered. "
The personal application is clear; he had on his mind his
own hatred of women, which resulted from hatred of his own
sexual drive. He showed insight into the problem even if his
words expressed resignation. The man who wrote these words
was not unwilling; more probably he was willing but resigned
because he felt that the game was lost. And the spirit behind
the words indicated how chaotic his psychological condition
was.
The abandonment of his earlier beliefs concerning individ-
uality and women were signs of a new development of his
personality. A masochist in need of heaven, he now believed
only in the eternity of the idea of the good. It is not surprising
that on the day before his death he made to Lucka remarks
that implied a connection between his abandonment of his
ideas of individuality and his opinion of suicide (Lucka, p.
The theory that his behavior revealed a disintegrated per-
sonality seemed to be contradicted by his actions. Though his
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? Genius and Insanity 181
mood was dark and sinister, his behavior was not, to all ap-
pearances, very different from his earlier conduct. The conflict
and division within him is illumined by the story of his part-
ing with his father. He asked the elder Weininger to go with
him to the street-car stop, then stood letting one car after an-
other go by until he finally managed to tear himself away.
This was his final, painful, but concealed parting from his
father, to whom he had felt very close. Although hard pressed,
he finally reacted adequately. He was convinced of what he
should do, and he departed from his father.
In the last week of his life he tried also to see Gerber, and
at the end he wrote letters to his father and his brother Rich-
ard. Perhaps the letters and the visits might be interpreted as
expressions of the hope that they might save him from his
fate. Yet while he appeared as usual to his associates he was
headed to his doom.
It is not rare for gifted schizophrenic persons with signs of
personality disintegration to retain--at least superficially--the
power of organized and logical action. Yet fundamentally
their behavior always corresponds to the rhythms of their
inner worlds. From the summer of 1903 until he took his own
life, Weininger presented the picture, not of definite, com-
plete insanity, but of a mental state in which attacks of psy-
chosis were constantly digging into his personality, destroying
it bit by bit, leaving some wounds which never healed.
There was an ambiguity in his disease. As morbid traits
threatened to become dominant, he had to exert great effort
to keep his psychosis under control. He succeeded for the most
part and was such a master at checking his morbid inclinations
that he almost seemed to be playing with his own tendency
to insanity. The night of November 20, 1902, was for him full
of imperative hallucinations which give the impression of a
paranoid form of schizophrenia. But apart from that incident
until the last few days before his suicide his development
showed no obvious signs of flourishing schizophrenia. Though
personality split threatened, he managed to keep his personal-
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Genius and Insanity
ity integrated. Then after May, 1903, the threat came again,
and he hovered between a split and control of the disease. Yet
he appeared to be always in control of the disease until the
last few days of his life, when he seemed again dominated by
his psychosis.
He himself was aware of the change in his own condition,
though he did not really understand it. He felt his sickness
but could not diagnose his morbid trend. In his quest for
metaphysical meanings, we find him saying these words about
insanity in Vber die letzten Dinge (pp. 124-25): "Even be-
fore I began to study the horse from the point of view of ani-
mal psychology, the head of the horse made a peculiar im-
pression on me, gave me the impression of a lack of freedom.
At the same time I realized that the head might seem ridicu-
lous. It is strange the way a horse continually bows his head.
Not with the same certainty as when I thought of the dog, but
still with the surety of a guiding thought, I had the feeling
that the horse represents insanity. The alogical element in the
behavior of horses, the nervous and neurasthenic feeling akin
to insanity which always causes one to complain and feel sur-
prise, served to confirm the impression. "
He also made the comment that "the danger of insanity is
always present in those who try to penetrate" the discipline of
logic and pure knowledge. Since he had devoted years to the
search for pure knowledge, he obviously had fears for his own
sanity.
Moreover, his doubts of his own reasoning power and his
conclusions made him consider his thoughts as sinful and
created in him a feeling of guilt. To this feeling he gave open
expression in an aphorism probably written in the summer of
1903. "When a man becomes insane, it is only a result of his
own guilt" (U. L. D. , p. 59).
This feeling of guilt was not only a starting point for his
mental crisis, but also the very substance of it. The fight to
overcome his guilt--arising out of sexual cravings he could not
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? Genius and Insanity 183
overcome--was the heart of the crisis which he underwent
while trying to preserve a cool exterior.
Beneath his control, his attitude was shy and uncertain,
quite unlike his earlier fighting spirit. His imagination was
haunted by thoughts of evil, and his behavior was a queer
confusion of self-reproach and ideas of his own sanctity and
purity. The last two days and nights he wrote furiously away
at the "Letzte Aphorismen," and some of the words he wrote
give clear hints of the approaching catastrophe. "Everything
I have created," he said in a passage that appeared only in the
first edition (p. xx), "must perish because it was written in
an evil spirit--with, perhaps, the one exception that God or
the good exists in no separate thing in nature. " As Rappaport
says (U. L. D. , p. xx): "He was engulfed in complete darkness.
He was haunted by the most complete pessimism, which he
felt as guilt"
We know that feelings of guilt may result from the suppres-
sion of desires and feelings of hatred and revenge. In general
the more violent the unconscious feelings of revenge, the more
pronounced is the inclination to delusional ideas of guilt.
Weininger's belief that all evil was due to his own guilt can
be understood only by considering his psychological develop-
ment, particularly his inclinations to hatred and revenge. He
hated Jews and women. It is not surprising, therefore, when
we find that the aphorisms that he wrote on the last night of
his life are charged with hatred. He turned against the Jews
and Judaism in rage. "It is Jewish," he wrote (U. L. D. , p. 183),
"to blame the other (Christianity). Judaism means laying all
blame on someone else. The devil is the man who blames the
faithful (God). In this respect Judaism is the radical evil. He
is stupid who laughs frivolously at the question, who does not
recognize the problem: The Parsifal Legend. The Jew takes no
blame: 'How can I help it? ' The Christian assumes all guilt.
The Jew will accept no guilt (i. e. , no problem either) . . . he
is opposed to the will of God who wants evil. "
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? 184 Genius and Insanity
The last three aphorisms, of which portions have just been
quoted, are the last of the sixty-two aphorisms printed in the
first edition of Vber die letzten Dinge. The book contains only
eight more aphorisms concerning Jews and the Jewish prob-
lem. Rappaport omitted these final commentaries from the
later editions. Reading them and seeing the vicious hatred
they express, we can well understand why. As a friend of
Weininger, Rappaport probably wished to hide such hate-
filled and morbid expressions.
In the final analysis the contempt and rage of Weininger
were directed against himself. He felt weak and powerless,
filled with anxiety. He had constantly within him the fear of
impotence and a feeling that he was castrated (castration com-
plex). In general this feeling of castration is the deepest un-
conscious root of anti-Semitism, and it was the basis of Wei-
ninger's monstrous anti-Semitism. His wild hatred of women
also rose from the same feeling. It is interesting to note what
Freud himself says on this point. "Weininger (the young phi-
losopher who, highly gifted but sexually deranged, committed
suicide after producing his remarkable book Geschlecht und
Charakter), in a chapter that has attracted much attention,
treated Jews and women with equal hostility and overwhelmed
them with the same insults. " Freud goes on to say that Wein-
inger was completely swayed by "his infantile complexes; and
from that standpoint what is common to Jews and women is
their relation to the castration complex. " 15
Weininger sought passionately to deny Judaism because that
would mean to deny self. Basically the denial of his mother
religion was also directed against his mother, whom he hated.
His hatred of Judaism and Jews was connected with feelings of
guilt at his conversion to Christianity. He felt despair and
the need for atonement, and his guilt was in his mind related
to his desire for sanctity. He believed that no one else had
ever understood Jesus Christ as well as he did (U. L. D. , p.
xviii), and possibly in the last period of his life he naively
1S Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, III (London, 1925), 179.
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? Genius and Insanity 185
thought that he was God or at least godlike (U. L. D. , p. 43).
Another of the aphorisms deleted after the first edition says
(U. L. D. , p. 182), "Even at the time of the birth of Christ
there must have been many great men who were not chosen
and have been forgotten. " He may have felt that he was a
great man chosen for a new atonement of the sins of the
world.
He certainly tried to free himself of sexual desire by
becoming the master of it. In his gigantic struggle, he took
upon his own shoulders the responsibility of dealing with man
and the universe. He thereby identified himself with the whole
world and inevitably concluded that all evil was his own guilt.
It is no cause for wonder that his friends and companions
did not fathom the conditions behind his suicide. Apart from
the most ordinary cases it is hard, generally speaking, to find
the true motives for suicide. Sometimes even the diaries of
those who die a natural death give a false picture of the cir-
cumstances prior to death, as Goethe's Dichtung und Wahr-
heit (Poetry and Truth) does. In Weininger's case the people
around him did not understand what was going on in him,
even after he realized that his own life was at stake. He wrote
of Sex and Character that "this book means a sentence of
death upon either the book or the author. " And when he left
Vienna for Italy he made a statement (printed only in the
first edition of U. L. D. ) that he had decided not to return to
Vienna before matters were settled. The same thought echoed
in his words (U. L. D. , p. xx), "My return to Vienna should
have been another incarnation. "
The fact that his associates did not understand his mental
condition may have furthered his suicide plans. Yet it seems
doubtful whether his close friends could have helped him out
of his mental crisis. They admired him too much and had too
uncritical an attitude. The reverence Rappaport showed in
writing (U. L. D. , pp. xx-xxi) about Weininger's funeral was
typical: "It should be mentioned that at the time of his fu-
neral there was a partial eclipse of the moon in Vienna which
ended at the exact moment when his body was lowered into
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? 186 Genius and Insanity
the grave. Schopenhauer relates that when Immanuel Kant
was buried, 'a white cloud went up into the sky, making it
clearer and purer than before. ' " 19
Another friend, Lucka, showed the same reverent and un-
critical attitude. "There are," he said, "sufficient facts about
this suicide to indicate that his motives were quite extraor-
dinary--in fact something which has never before happened
in the modern world. This assertion, however, cannot yet be
proved" (Die Fackel, October 17, 1903, p. 16).
The explanations of the suicide offered by commentators
have not been very satisfactory. Probst's attempt to show that
Weininger shot himself because he had once spoken of suicide
in a restaurant seems obviously false and fruitless. The ex-
planation Weininger's father offered--that Otto had com-
mitted suicide because he did not wish others to believe that
he had indulged in vain boasting--is no more helpful.
Stekel believed that Weininger committed suicide because
he had realized that the arguments of Sex and Character were
untrue. "Before the book was published, a well-known neu-
rologist in Vienna (probably Freud) read the book and con-
sidered it dangerous--written by a genius who wanted above
all to become famous. " The work was done with the confi-
dence of youth. Even though the author may have confused
transitory moods with the basis of his philosophic world view,
surely this was the extent of Weininger's dishonesty--hardly
enough to cause a remorseful suicide.
Weininger's self-esteem was seemingly so great that attack
upon his ideas served only to plant them more firmly within
him. Criticism only strengthened his faith in his principles
after the book was published. The struggle between his own
moral strictures of his conduct and the strength of his biolog-
ical drives ended in a strange religious metaphysic, centered
completely about his ego. In spite of the pathos and senti-
16 It was only in the first edition that Rappaport mentioned the eclipse of the
moon. The Astrophysical Institute of Oslo has informed me that a partial
eclipse of the moon did take place over the southeastern part of Europe on
October 6, 1903.
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? Genius and Insanity 187
mentalism with which he surrounded himself, he was still a
striving man, living within the circle of his own fantasies. His
suicide could then have resulted from his desire not to destroy
his theory by his own practice. 17
Finally, the possible explanation that he was in a state of
delirium during the last days of his life must be discarded. His
conduct was too composed and organized to admit of delir-
ium. He talked with his family, with Lucka, and with his pub-
lisher. None of them noticed anything strange in his behavior.
And even when he rented the room in the house where Bee-
thoven died he transacted the required business normally.
The true and accurate explanation of the suicide must be
found in the course of his mental illness, which developed to
an acute phase in the summer of 1903. We have already seen
how schizophrenia was in progress. Weininger advanced to a
final submersion in a sort of mystic life in communion with a
superior force (God) and ended in cosmic experiences, in ideas
of atonement, sanctity, and destruction. He identified himself
with the idea of Christlike sanctity and struggled against a
sense of overwhelming guilt, bred of his self-isolation, his in-
trospection, and his feelings of hatred and revenge.
In the last week of his life his mental crisis grew more and
more acute, the conflict grew more fierce. The contrasts within
him were deep. The desire to live struggled in him with the
desire to die. As soon as he returned to Vienna he wished to
leave once more. His attempts to see Gerber, his protracted
parting from his father, his final letters, were all expressions
of his hope to be saved from death. At the same time he did
not want to live. Conflicting tendencies whirled in his mind;
every thought called forth its antithesis, bringing continuous
contradiction. This ambivalence reached the point where he
wished at the same time both to live and to die. He had been
unsuccessful in his attempt to repress his hostility. Hatred of
his own sexual desires had led to hatred of himself and to feel-
ings of hostility. His attempts at repression were only partially
17 Carl Dallago, Otto Weininger und sein Werk (Innsbruck, 1912), p. 7.
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? 188
Genius and Insanity
successful, and hostile feelings popped to the surface whenever
he felt that he had neutralized them. His final diatribes
against the Jews showed his violent inclinations to revenge
and his overwhelming sense of guilt. He was stricken with de-
spair, which gradually spread within him until it amounted to
actual despair of his life.
This sense of guilt was connected with his feelings of
sadism. In him, as in any individual with an insatiable sadism
directed against all, the sadism was repressed in his uncon-
sciousness. As in other cases, so in Weininger too this severe
repression brought pain and depression. Weininger also had
the suppressed desire to be a criminal, the most wicked crim-
inal in the world, with greater guilt than any other. This urge,
with the repression of his sadistic tendencies, strengthened his
self-reproach, anxieties, and despondency.
His mystic desires for purity and atonement, for a life of
eternal truth, contended with the counter motives. He be-
lieved that his was a future more glorious than that of ordi-
nary men. Symbolically he entitled his last manuscript Vber
die letzten Dinge. In his distorted imaginings he lived at the
same time in a world of resignation and suffering, enduring
strong temptations of evil, and in a world of realism and great-
ness. Not long before he killed himself he told Swoboda that
there were three possibilities before him: suicide, the scaffold,
or a goal more wonderful than any that a human had fought
for before. And in one of the passages included in the first
edition of Vber die letzten Dinge (p. xvii) but deleted in
later editions he said, "If I am victorious, it will be the great-
est victory any man has ever won. "
Suicide was for him the path of evil. "There is," he said in
Taschenbuch (p. 176), "an ethical reason for a man's need of
a weapon (even if it be his hand) for taking his own life. He
did not bestow life on himself, and only God can take it away
from him; but the life of the suicide belongs to the devil. "
He had also said that his book meant a sentence of death
upon either the author or the book itself. The factors precipitat-
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? Genius and Insanity 189
ing his suicide seem to have been his loss of self-esteem and
prestige because of the failure of his book. It is quite true that
his self-esteem rose when his book was attacked, but it is prob-
able that deep within himself his self-confidence must have
been finally sapped. Since, generally speaking, such self-
confidence serves as a shield against anxieties, Weininger found
himself without defense. This condition led farther. Weininger
probably expected punishment to come swiftly. It seems safe
to guess that when he was considering killing himself he had
first intended to kill someone else. His intended victim would
be one of the persons closest to himself in childhood--his
father or his mother. If he had, or thought he had, some con-
genital physical defect, his hatred toward them might well have
given rise to definite plans for murder. Yet in the end he di-
rected his sadism against himself. He had to rid himself of his
strong consciousness of the cruelty of his superego. This aim
he accomplished by self-punishment, self-destruction.
Connected with these surging emotions there must have
been, too, an idea or illusion that he might obtain gratification
through his suicide. Weininger simultaneously rebelled against
and submitted to, his superego. When he spoke of "the scaf-
fold" to Swoboda, he must have meant becoming a criminal.
When he spoke of a "wonderful goal," he was undeniably
cherishing the fantasy of becoming a hero, a god. Within him,
beneath a smooth and controlled surface, heavily charged emo-
tions rose to a storm. He, who was in his own imagination
both hero and criminal, lost the battle.
When we review Weininger's mental condition, we find an
amazing range of psychological phenomena within its envelop-
ing structure: hysterical reactions, deep contradictions, sadis-
tic and masochistic impulses, guilt feelings, sexual cravings,
hallucinations, introversion, and periods of split personality.
He was always on the borderline, and his ability to adapt to
reality steadily decreased.
Yet though the clinical picture varies, there is little doubt
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? 1go Genius and Insanity
that his disease belonged to the schizophrenic group. His at-
titude was autistic, or rather deiristic (thinking away from the
subject). He used images and symbols that showed psychotic
thinking and the regression of his instinctual drives to an early
narcissistic episode in his life. His narcissism apparently was
steadily nourished from his id (instinctual impulses), and the
development suggests that his regression went back to the time
when his ego was first in the process of formation, probably
to the oral phase, which precedes the oral-sadistic period. His
autistic thoughts became incorrigible and for him took on the
value of reality. The factual world lost its actuality and became
for him only words, words to which he clung. He lived in a
world of which he was the center.
His illness, however, deviated from ordinary cases of schizo-
phrenia. He did not reach the stage of stupor, because his
mental functions seemed to have been practically intact. Even
at the peak of his psychosis his introspection and his analytical
ability were as brilliant as ever. For him new experiences, hav-
ing depth of meaning, took the form of reality, though often
in grotesque shape. In the ordinary schizophrenic person a
new and fundamental experience is quite personal in mean-
ing; in the secondary stage it may evolve into creative expres-
sion but originally it has for him no existence in reality. Thus,
in the ordinary schizophrenic the mental functions seem more
or less destroyed, in Weininger they were superficially pre-
served.
To find cases like that of Weininger we must turn to those
men of creative minds who have been afflicted with schizo-
phrenia. In this group some notable figures are Vincent Van
Gogh, August Strindberg, and Friedrich Holderlin. 18 The
question then arises as to the relationship between Weininger
and his work. Since it has been assumed that in the cases of
Van Gogh, Strindberg, and Holderlin, their artistic work was
18 Karl Jaspers, Strindberg und Van Gogh; Versuch einer pathologischen Ana-
lyse unter vergleichender Heranziehung von Swedenborg und Holderlin (Berlin,
1926).
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? Genius and Insanity 191
furthered by their psychosis,19 we must ask, Shall we compare
Weininger and his work to a tree and its fruit? The usually
complex relationship between creator and creation is most
easily seen when it seems immediately apparent that the au-
thor is the sole originator of the work, as in the case of Wei-
ninger. Though the latter part of his book was created while his
psychosis was developing, the book was not necessarily a result
of the mental state. It may, however, be said that morbid or
abnormal motives seem to have acted as a kind of motor for a
talent which was in him always new and fresh. His concept
of his work changed as a result of the psychosis of that No-
vember night of 1902. He created a new style, different from
that of the relatively healthy Weininger of 1900 and 1901.
This change in him may be compared to the process of schizo-
phrenic change in Swedenborg. 20
In the second half of Sex and Character there are hints that
the book was written in a schizophrenic atmosphere. The rea-
son why schizophrenic traits are not so apparent in the first
part of the book is that those chapters mostly contain his
factual material and knowledge. His great store of information
was coordinated with amazing talent, and the schizophrenic
outbursts are cleverly disguised.
The writing of the whole book was to some extent an aes-
thetic disguise. The face of reality was too harsh for Weininger
to gaze upon directly; to see it he had to use the spectacles of
aesthetics. Only thus could he permit his unconscious to formu-
late conscious ideas. Only thus could he obtain the satisfaction
otherwise denied to him. Through symbols and images his
repressed desires were able to pass the censor of his unconscious.
If we may label as "inspiration" the unconscious element
in a work of art while considering the formative part as pos-
sibly being conscious, then Weininger's "inspiration" lay in
the process of aesthetic disguise. Through it the conscious ideas
emerged out of the unconscious and rose to artistic expression.
1? Hans Gruhle, Psychopathie und Insinn (Berlin, 1932, Neue Deutsche Klinik,
Band IX).
20 Jaspers, Strindberg and Von Gogh, p. 87.
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? 192
Genius and Insanity
It may well be that this same sort of "inspiration" is to be seen
generally in creative artists. 21
Like Van Gogh, Strindberg, and Holderlin, Weininger lived
under the shadow of schizophrenia. His experiences were col-
ored by it, and ideas emerged which might not have revealed
themselves so obviously but for his diseased condition.