No More Learning

"Suicide does not show courage," he comments, "but cow-
ardice, even though it is the smallest of all cowardice"
(U. L. D. , p. xxii). From Weininger's point of view this is
nothing but a hopeless confession. And in his last letter to
Rappaport (no date) he wrote, "Fear is the reverse of every
will. . . . But I believe fear is also related to indecency"
(U. L. D. ,p. xxiv).
These quotations give a good picture of Weininger during
his visit to Italy. They show that he was deeply depressed and
was thinking of suicide. The opinion of Weininger's father--
and he was right--was that an expert should have taken these
letters as a warning. Certain statements in the chapter "Apho-
ristisches" in Vber die letzten Dinge show preoccupation with
the thought of dying by his own hand: "Every decent man will
seek death when he knows that he is ultimately evil. Base
people are sent to death by a legal sentence. . . . All realiza-
tion is a release" (Taschenbuch, p. 66). No doubt he was
thinking of himself. And there is an obvious reference to him-
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? 144 Crossing the Border
self in the following passage from Taschenbuch (p. 64): "The
man who does not succeed in his suicide? He is the complete
criminal, because he wants to live in order to revenge himself.
Everything evil is revenge. " Weininger wanted to take his life
in November, 1902; when he did not succeed, he looked on
the attempt as desire to be able to revenge himself. If his in-
terpretation is right, as seems probable, it perfectly exemplifies
Weininger's gift of rationalizing, which in him, as so often in
others, is best expressed in moral behavior. 6
Weininger returned to Vienna in September, 1903, in the
deepest despair. His mood had become more and more mis-
erable. The desperate effort at self-control had apparently
taken all his energy. His gloomy state of mind seemed to in-
dicate that his spirit was broken (. U. L. D. , p. xxiii; Ewald, p.
68; Taschenbuch, p. 21).
He stayed with his parents five days. There is every reason
to believe that this was longer than he had at first planned.
In that last week he had a talk with Gerber. "I had no idea,"
says Gerber, "that he was thinking of suicide. When I saw
him for the last time he said, 'The one criticism that cannot
be made is that my book suffers from a lack of inspiration.
You did not help me with the proofreading of the first edition.
You have no examination now. Promise that you will be re-
sponsible for the second edition. ' On the same occasion he
also said, 'We shall not see each other again soon/ and gave
as reason that he had some work which he had to finish at
once" (Taschenbuch, pp. 21-22).
These statements give clear indication of his suicide plans.
Yet Gerber did not understand them as an expression of
Weininger's last will and testament; he admits that he had no
idea that Weininger intended to commit suicide. When they
parted, they did so "without being in any way solemn, just
cordial in the ordinary way" (Taschenbuch, p. 22).
"But the next evening," Gerber writes, "Weininger came to
see me at my home. I was not there. The following day I
8 B. Hart, The Psychology of Insanity (Cambridge, 1936), p. 67.
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? Crossing the Border 145
heard that Weininger had paced up and down my room in
great excitement and waited in vain for many hours. Late at
night he left. He had left word that I should not expect him
the next day, and I didn't. But he did return. He stayed at
my place for hours until late at night. Then he left again,
leaving word that he would not return under any circum-
stances. Once more he came back without finding me. The
same happened several days. Thus, I never did meet him
again. Perhaps the conflict between his words and his actions
was nothing but an expression of his struggle for life. Perhaps
he was afraid of meeting me because I had once before kept
him from killing himself. And yet he returned over and over
again, he hoped and he waited, and thought to see in the fact
of his not meeting his friend an indication that he must die"
(Taschenbuch, p. 22).
He also tried to see Ewald, but did not find him at home
either. The conflict between Weininger's movements and his
thoughts in those days--on the one hand trying to see Gerber
and Ewald, on the other trying to avoid a meeting--may rep
resent truly the struggle between his desire to live after all
and the trend of his thoughts toward self-destruction.
His father says that "his mood was extremely depressed, but
not more so than was the case eleven months previously [the
day in November, 1902]. I asked whether he had any physical
pain and he answered with an emphatic negative, which was,
I think, perfectly true. I asked him whether any external cir-
cumstances had caused him mental suffering, perhaps in rela-
tion to some woman. He denied it, and I don't doubt for a
moment the truth of his denial" (Der Fall, pp. 7-8). Otto
Weininger's manner was gloomy, closed, apparently con-
trolled, so much so that no one really understood his mental
condition. But within him a battle was going on. His desire to
suppress the heavy inner conflict was great, but against this
desire rose the wish to put an end to his life. On October 3,
he left his parents' home and took a room in the house in
Schwarzspanierstrasse where Beethoven had died. After he had
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? 146 Crossing the Border
rented the room, he left and returned at 10 o'clock in the
evening. He then told the landlady that he was not to be dis-
turbed before morning since he was going to work and would
go to bed late. His landlady the next morning knocked on his
door in vain, and his brother Richard arrived in great excite-
ment and had the door opened by a locksmith. Richard and
his father had received letters from Otto by the morning mail,
telling them that he was going to shoot himself. When the
door was opened, Weininger was found lying fully dressed on
the floor, unconscious, with a wound in the left part of his
chest. He was rushed by the voluntary ambulance corps to
Wiener Allgemeiner Krankenhaus, where he died that morn-
ing at 10:30.
In a letter from this hospital it is stated: "On October 4,
1903, we received a patient, Otto Weininger, age 24, doctor
philosophiae, from Schwarzspanierstrasse 15. He had shot
himself in the left part of his chest with suicidal intent. The
patient died from his wound the same day at 10:30 a. m. No
more information here. " There was no post mortem, as there
was no doubt of the suicide.
In his mental development during the last six months of his
life (the spring and summer of 1903) new symptoms had ap-
peared, some emotional and some intellectual: despair, mis-
ery, hatred, and at the same time comfort in Divine Grace
which mounted to a feeling of sanctity and of ecstasy. The
conflict had culminated in his suicide.
The suicide was a severe blow to his father. After all he did
not seem to have understood thoroughly how serious the men-
tal condition of his son was, although he was the only one
who had taken Otto's letters as a warning of an inner crisis.
His apparent inability to realize his son's death can be seen
only in the light of his own nature; he rarely, if ever, expressed
outwardly the pain he felt in his heart. The death notice,
which he submitted to the Vienna newspapers and which in
itself caused a sensation because of the words "free will," was
typical of him. It read:
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? Crossing the Border 147
Our poor son, Otto Weininger, doctor philosophiae, yesterday
morning of his own free will took his own life. His friends will please
note that the funeral will take place at 4:30 Tuesday afternoon at
the Matzleindorf Evangelical Cemetery.
Vienna, October 5, 1903 his parents
Although the funeral was heartbreaking, Otto's father kept
calm. Lucka, who attended the service, describes it thus: "1
can still see him clearly, though it was close to twenty years
ago, as he stood by the grave of his eldest son, with unbowed
head, looking the minister straight in the eye as the Lord's
Prayer was said. The funeral was full of heartrending scenes,
but the man stood there as immovable as a statue, looking
neither to the right nor to the left. He did not cry, not then;
but I believe that he carried the pain within him--all the way
inside that closed and cruel thing which must have been deep
in his heart and which I cannot interpret. "
Typical was Leopold Weininger's reaction when Lucka saw
him a few days after Otto's funeral. "With a painful smile--
one of those smiles which often passed quickly over his face--
he showed me a leather case for glasses which Otto had given
to him the day before he committed suicide. Now the father
could understand the gift. "
And again, when reading the inscription he put on his son's
tomb, one gets this same impression of restraint. It reads as
follows:
This stone marks the resting place of a young man whose spirit
found no peace in this world. When he had delivered the message
of his soul, he could no longer remain among the living. He betook
himself to the place of death of one of the greatest of all men, the
Schwarzspanierhaus in Vienna, and there destroyed his mortal body.
There is not one loving word in this memorial. It is a neu-
tral description of a young man who could not find peace. It
reveals nothing of the loss and pain that one would expect a
father to show at the death of his son.
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? 148 Crossing the Border
Certainly, he did not yield to the touching paternal tears
that would have been fitting in a father, just as Otto with all
his capacities, frustrating as they were, did not react in a way
typical of anyone but himself.
Weininger had died and was mourned by only a small circle.
Yet Strindberg, who had written in praise of the book soon
after its appearance, was one of those to note his passing. The
letter he wrote his translator in July was not published until
after Otto's death (in Die Fackel, October 17, 1903). Imme-
diately after the news had come, he wrote an article dated at
. 1 Stockholm, October 12, 1903, and entitled "Idolatry--Gyn-
} olatry: A Postscript by August Strindberg. " In it he expressed
his agreement with Weininger's opinion of women even more
forcibly than in the letters he had written in July.
The interest Strindberg took in Weininger was more than
a coincidence. The two had much the same sort of personal-
ity, and they passed through similar development. Therefore
at base they had much in common and were psychologically
alike. Both had periods of extreme conflict, and each had a
split personality make-up, in which tendency and counter-
tendency, thought and counterthought, action and counter-
action, formed a dominant imaginary world. They both ex-
perienced a continual shifting from self-esteem to feelings of
inferiority and back again, with anxieties in the face of reality.
They both were nagged by feelings of guilt and self-reproach. 7
In his article Strindberg said: "The single fact that men
have created all culture, spiritual as well as material, shows
man's superior position; only the feebleminded would try to
7 A discussion of Strindberg's personality is beyond the scope of this book.
. _~. See S. Rabner, "August Strindberg: Eine pathologische Studie" in Grenzfragen
der Literatur der Medicin, Vol. VI (1907). Rabner makes the unlikely di-
agnosis that Strindberg suffered from melancholia. A. Storch, in a thorough
psychological-psychiatric analysis of his personality ("August Strindberg im
Lichte der Selbstbiographie,' in Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenleben,
1921, especially pp. 21, 25, 58, 63, 73), proves that Strindberg suffered from
-? schizophrenia. See also the impressive study by Karl Jaspers, Strindberg und
Van Gogh (Berlin, 1926).
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? Crossing the Border 149
contest this statement--those who speak well of Rosa Bon-
heur's inferior pictures, of the emancipation literature of
George Sand, and of Bertha Suttner's usurpation of the peace
problem, of which she was not the discoverer. . . . Accord-
ing to the latest analysis, female love consists '50 percent of
sexual desire and 50 percent of hatred. This seems strange, but
it is not. Regardless of the sympathies and tastes, opinions,
etc.
, we find that when a woman loves a man she hates him--
hates him because she is tied to him and feels inferior to him.
In her love there is no constant flow, but a continual repolariz-
ing, eternal changing in the current, which shows the negative,
the passive, element in her being, as opposed to the positive
and active in man. . . .
"Put in a few words, this was the secret that Otto Wei-
ninger had the courage to disclose; this was his discovery of the
feminine being and nature, which is set down in his virile
book Sex and Character, and for it he had to pay with his life.
"I place a wreath on his grave because I honor his memory
as that of one of the courageous, masculine thinkers. "
After Weininger's death, Gerber got in touch with Strind-
berg, who wrote two letters in reply. These show the similarity
in the spiritual Worlds of Weininger and Strindberg. Since
they have not been published before in English, they are
quoted at length here.
Dear Doctor:
I understood our dead friend, and I thank you. Some years ago
when I felt the same ambition that Weininger felt to go further,
I wrote in my diary: "Why do I keep going on? Cato gave himself
up to death when he realized that he could not stay clear of the
swamp of sin. Therefore Dante absolved him from his suicide. Now
I am sinking and I don't want to sink, therefore . . . Bang! " I was
on the road uphill until a woman dragged me down. Yet I went
on living because I understood that connection with a woman was
a sacrifice, a duty, a test. We must not live like gods here on earth;
we must live in filth and still stay pure, etc. Do you remember the
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? 150 Crossing the Border
Maeterlinck case? It was exactly the same! He was far above the
material (he Tresor des humbles), when the earthly woman came
along. . . . He fell so deep that he carried his naked spirit of earth
around to exhibit it! Is that not tragic?
When Dr. Luther married he wrote to a friend: "I marry! In-
credible! I am ashamed! But it seems that God wants to make a fool
of me! "
Can you send me the biographies and everything? Shering wrote
me when he died: "Weininger has conquered his faith by death. "
Yes, I was at the point of doing the same thing in 1880! I should
have, but for my discovery. It was not a concept, but a discovery,
and Weininger was a discoverer.
The new generation seems to find new truths; the zoological
Weltanschauung ended up as veterinary psychology. We searchers
seek for immortal souls and are therefore called religious. I am, but
I have no use for a creed.
Call me a "Christian freethinker" until I can think of something
better.
Your unknown friend at a distance,
Stockholm August Strindberg
Karlavagen 40
October 22,1903
Dear Doctor:
That strange, that mysterious man, Weininger! He was born
with a sense of guilt like mine! I came into the world with a guilty
conscience, with fright at everything, with anxiety for people and
for life. I believe now that I did something wrong before I was born.
What does that mean? Only the theosophists have the courage to
answer. Like Weininger, I became religious out of fear, the fear of
becoming inhuman. I adored Beethoven as he did, even established
a Beethoven club where we played only Beethoven, but I noticed
that so-called good people did not like Beethoven. The man who is
unhappy, restless, cannot be called heavenly; he is certainly tran-
scendental.
Weininger's fate? Did he indeed betray the secret of the gods?
Did he steal the fire? The air was too heavy for him here, therefore
he was suffocated. This cynical life became too cynical for him!
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? Crossing the Border 151
That he is gone means to me that he had the Supreme permission
to go. Otherwise, such things do not happen.
So it was written.
Yours,
Stockholm August Strindberg
December 8,1903
P. S. Please don't publish my letters until after my death.
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? Senilis and
Insanity
V%/here is the borderline between the normal and the
T abnormal mind? How often have we not seen an
apparently normal individual suddenly indulge in aberrant or
quite abnormal actions, and then just as suddenly resume his
conventional character? Imagine a man who is highly gifted,
intellectually endowed, a meteor in the realm of thought, who
has developed theories and concepts opposed to all the
thought of the past and clings to his own ideas even when his
constructive intelligence should tell him that they are mis-
taken. Is such a man normal or abnormal?
Look at Weininger. In spite of his violent mental conflicts
and the serious internal struggles which sometimes threatened
to split his personality, he was still able to control his trend to
insanity. After a short period of confusion, he still seemed
capable of organized, logical action. In spite of the bizarre and
fanciful ideas he presented to the bewildered reader of his
book, he often displayed profound insight into the unexplored
realms of psychology--an insight not infrequently brightened
with flashes of genius. In addition, after that eventful Novem-
ber night when his suicide was averted, Weininger presented
to the men about him, at least to those with no knowledge of
mental disease, an exterior in no way out of the ordinary.
Apparently he was in the borderland of normality. What
were the aspects of his somewhat equivocal mental condition?
A clue to understanding it and his general personal make-up
may be found in his basic shut-in (schizoid) attitude, which
explains why he showed no overt abnormal manifestations,
apart from the episode of the night of November 20, 1902.
His closest friends, Gerber and Lucka, knew that he had an
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? Genius and Insanity 153
1
odd nature, but it seemed to them no more than odd; they
certainly did not realize that his peculiarity might develop into
insanity. Even though a few of his friends had some knowl-
edge of psychology, they were still unable to judge his state of
mind.
It is not surprising that Swoboda says (p. 34): "I was never
able to discover any trace of abnormal feeling in Weininger,
and I would certainly have noticed anything of the sort in our
intimate relationship. On the contrary, I can definitely state
that Weininger was as sane as one can possibly expect a gen-
ius to be. " Yet it is surprising that after such remarks he con-
cluded with these words (p. 44), "The various disturbances
in his emotions and intellect were a result of disturbances in
his biological drives. "
Lucka knew of no insanity in the Weininger family, nor
did he consider Weininger's mind in any way diseased or
schizophrenic (Letter VIII). This opinion he had expressed
shortly after Weininger's death in Die Fackel, October 17,1903
(p. 16): "Not for one minute of his life was Weininger insane.
I talked with him myself the night before he killed himself. He
talked with his publisher the same evening, and with his own
family even later. Neither I nor anyone else noticed any de-
rangement or any exceptional excitement in him. "
This view contrasted with the opinion expressed when in
his book (Ofro Weininger: Der Mensch und sein Werfe, pp.
4, 5) he maintained that during the first part of 1903 it be-
came more and more difficult to get along with Weininger,
who was completely absorbed in his own thoughts. This
change continued in Weininger after Sex and Character had
been published, and he usually appeared gloomy and uncom-
fortable.
It is interesting in his connection to consider Rappaport's
observation (U. L. D. , p. xv): "Weininger could easily place
himself in the position of a criminal. Because of his universal
disposition, it is probable that he had all the instincts of the
criminal. But were they the original motive power? It is com-
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? 154 Genius and Insanity
mon knowledge that the phenomena of crime and insanity are
sometimes parallel. The continual desire to lie, to tyrannize,
to murder--perhaps they were all merely obsessional ideas.
His fear of becoming a murderer, which led him to his suicide,
was probably a phobia. In that case he was a victim of in-
sanity. " I have been told that Rappaport believed that Weinin-
ger committed suicide only because he wished to ward off his
strong inclinations to commit actual murder.
Weininger's sister maintained that no one of her family
was ever insane and that Otto was always well except during
the last months of his life, when his health was poor. "His
body was weakened by the many nights when he worked by
candlelight. His nervous system suffered, as you can see in his
writings" (Letter IX).
An expert has directed my attention to some curious parallels
in the conduct of Jonathan Swift, Heinrich von Kleist, and
Weininger. It is generally agreed that both Swift and Kleist
had small, inadequately developed genital organs. It is possible
that a similar deficiency lay behind the tragedy of Weininger,
affecting his mental development.
The picture his friends drew of his mental condition is quite
perplexing. Yet his mental make-up may explain the conflict-
ing statements. His mental state was neither normal nor, as
his friends may have thought, one of simple and usual depres-
sion. There was much more to it. Only Swoboda was on the
right track when he felt that Weininger's derangement was
due to disturbances in his biological drives. He, however,
halted his examination just where he should have started.
Therefore, let us look more closely at one aspect of his state
of mind--the phenomehon of hysteria. Clearly his hysterical
symptoms do not necessarily change our general view of his
mental disorder. Manifestations of hysteria are not uncom-
mon phenomena in schizophrenic diseases. When the sup-
posedly hysterical patient gradually turns to permanent de-
mentia, then the case is probably not hysteria but schizo-
phrenia.
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? Genius and Insanity 155
In Weininger the hysterical traits are so obvious and so
pure that one might easily believe he suffered from hysteria.
Mobius was well aware of this fact when he wrote in his long
article that "the history of Otto Weininger gives a definite
impression of a hysterical mask. " 1 Probst thought that Wei-
ninger suffered from hysteria with symptoms of a manic-
depressive disease (Der Fall, pp. 35-39).
Wilhelm Stekel also found hysterical traits in Weininger.
"The way I see it--and my impression has been confirmed by
an intimate friend of his--Weininger always felt a deep fas-
cination for all that was feminine and for everything con-
cerned with sex, and this impression is borne out by his pecul-
iarly stereotyped choice of literature, reading which must have
required several years, probably going back to his schooldays.
With this heavy ballast of knowledge, with his neuropatholog-
ical and probably hysterical disposition, which caused him to
suffer from displaced and painful sexual thoughts, he finally
turned to women, and his physical nature failed. Reality could
never live up to his dreams and his indefatigable imagination"
(Die Wage, No. 45, November, 1904, p. 1032). Thus, Wei-
ninger's morbid development was due to a repression of his
sexual life.
These hysterical traits appeared so clearly in Weininger
after his eighteenth year that the question arises as to whether
they were not bound up with his personality make-up.
When his whole life is viewed, he seems a man in need of
showing off. This tendency developed gradually during his
childhood, at school, and at the university, becoming more or
less conscious. The desire to proclaim himself was deeply
rooted in his personality. His attitude toward his father when
he begged for permission to study at the University, his duel,
his demonstrative conversion to Christianity the day he re-
ceived his degree, his threats to kill himself in 1902--all these
show a strong tendency to exhibitionism. Bumke's words are
true of Weininger, "The natural attitude of a hysteric is
1 Ceschlecht und Unbescheidenheit (Halle an der Saale, 1907), pp. 28-29.
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? 156 Genius and Insanity
the pose. " Even if Weininger often wanted to get away, to
hide himself, nevertheless whatever he touched became part
of his dramatic attitude. He had a natural talent for the dra-
matic, as well as for the tragic. His whole life was, indeed, a
tragic drama, as is often the case with such a personality type.
Weininger himself discussed the human desire to make an
impression in "Ego Problems and Genius" (Sex and Charac-
ter, p. 226): "A great man--that is, a man to whom time has
no importance--seeks to increase his own value in the pres-
ence of his intelligible ego, his moral and intellectual con-
science. His vanity is always a vanity toward itself. A desire
originates in him to impress others by his thoughts, actions,
and productivity.