THE WOMAN QUESTION

 A GERMAN VIEW.

 "SEX AND CHARACTER."

Doctor Emil Reich writes in the London "Daily Mail' as follows:—
In 1903 there appeared in Vienna a book which at once raised a sensation among serious students, as well as among men and women of the world. It was an extraordinary book. The writer was manifestly in deep and passionate earnest about what he said, and he said it with an incisiveness and brilliancy that could not but come from long study and sincere belief in the "truth" revealed to him.
At the same time the book was in its way the most subversive book ever written on the subject of Woman. On a basis of carefully prepared scientific premises taken, it would appear, from the whole range of modern biology, physiology, psychology, and philosophy, the author proceeds to an arraignment and condemnation of Woman such as had never been ventured upon by the greatest of woman-haters among men.

SOULLESS AND NON-EXISTENT WOMAN.

In a tone of detached tranquillity, yet with a burning hatred of and contempt for Woman, Otto Weininger dissects and dismembers every particle of the conventional or traditional notion of Woman. He comes to the general conclusion that Woman has no soul at all.
"Women." Weininger says— (p. 280 of the English edition, newly published by Heinemann)— "Women have no existence, and no essence; they are not, they are nothing. Woman has no share in ontological reality, no relation to the (Kantian) thing-in-itself, which, in the deepest interpretation, is the absolute, is God. Man in his highest form, the genius, has such a relation; and for him the absolute is either the conception of the highest worth of existence, in which case he is a philosopher; or it is the wonderful fairyland of dreams, the kingdom of absolute beauty, and then he is an artist. . .. . Woman has no relation to the idea, she neither affirms nor denies it: she is neither moral nor anti-moral mathematically speaking, she has no sign, she is purposeless, neither good nor bad, neither angel nor devil, she is as non-moral as she non-logical. But all existence is moral and logical existence. So woman has no existence."
This central idea is illustrated, "proved," and "verified," with a grimness of detail and an academic jargon full of suggestiveness. Evidently Weininger was no mean effectologist— to imitate his coining of terms for once. He knew that people like words that everything is in a word; that words are to ideas proper what table decorations and silver knives are to the substance of food. People prefer an "elegant" table to good food. And accordingly he pours out his gonochorisms, idioplasms, arrhenoplasms,thelyplasms, heterostylisms, chemotaxis, henids. etc.. etc., in profusion, with the becoming caps and gowns of quotations, experiments and dark hints.
Having thus hypnotised his reader with all the apparatus of the most infantile of all modern sciences of physiological psychology, he commences his fierce onslaught on Woman. Woe to her! She has no memory, no imagination, no individuality whatever; she is "too low in the moral scale" to be called a criminal. She can neither love nor hate. Her love is purely and exclusively sexual, and as a mother she is as little worthy of admiration as when she sinks to the other extreme of femininity.

THE AUTHOR A BOY OF 21.

The most piquant feature of this book, however, is the fact that its author was a boy of 21. No such book has, to our knowledge, ever been written by a boy so young. We know of wonderful mathematicians and poets even younger than Weininger; but we have never heard of a youth so young attacking one of the most complicated problems of life with an apparent fulness of knowledge and a fury, so to speak, of psychological analysis that pursues its object into the last refuge of intimacy and secrecy. For this Chatterton of psychology does not mince matters in the least. Although his book is absolutely free from the least attempt at indelicacy, yet it is one totally unfit for girls or women. Not only would many a physiological detail shock them, but, what is very much more serious, they would— at least, many among them would — at once undergo that hypnosis to which too many women are liable at the hands of men who clothe their convictions in a garb of "scientific" wording. As for the toilette of their bodies, so women have a singular foible for terms, or the toilette of ideas.
Weininger, in spite of his youth, was steeped in that medley of sounds and ideas that in all universities passes for the "correct" thing to use in writing about deep problems. His book reads both as heavily and as brilliantly as any treatise or hand-book of a German University ponderosity, and as any feuilleton in the Vienna papers. Applying, as he does, the vast and uncouth terminology of biology to the study of human character, and easily covers his nakedness with the ribands and ruffles of academic costume.
Although he, unlike Dr Nordau, is fully aware that biology alone will never solve the mystery of character, individuality, and similar problems of the human soul, yet he does not even surmise that he missed the whole point in his study of woman by his complete ignorance of the various types of womanhood. For Weininger there is only one type of woman— Woman! Fortunately for all concerned, there is no woman indeed, as Weininger says, but there are women, or woman in a number of essentially different types. What, the poor boy knew was the woman of Vienna.

AN INFINITE VARIETY.

No wonder he thought that woman had neither existence nor essence. The Vienna woman is indeed save two or three years of her life when her fine exuberance of flesh and liveliness are not without a certain charm, something like a piece of good pastry after the grave rump-steak of life— the Viennese woman, we say, is indeed a quantite negligeable. She is not too uncomfortably remote from Weininger's general conception of woman. However, there are other women. As men in Vienna, with their unmistakable effeminacy in dress, speech, and manners, are radically different from Englishmen or Frenchmen, so are Viennese women from women in France, England, or America.
He who has not, a first-hand knowledge of these and other types is no way qualified to treat with authority the problem of woman's character. No biological terms or mere metaphysical borings into the rock of Reality can replace an intimate acquaintance with the various types of womanhood in Europe and America. Between the French woman and the American woman there is a gulf wider than that between Athens and Sparta. Even the Irishwoman is a type per se. Only when all these types of womanhood will be "clarified," to talk Weininger; only when we shall have exhaustive psychologies of each of them, as we had exhaustive monographs on the movements of our Earth and of Mars, before Newton established his final generalisation of our planetary system; only then a Newton of psychology will establish the real law of Female Attraction.
The gifted boy knew so little of foreign countries that on page 319 he actually says that Englishmen are "most adapted" for Society. Himself originally a Jew, he turned Protestant, became in due course an uncompromising Jew-baiter, Wagner-worshipper, Chopin-despiser, woman-abhorrer, and not unnaturally committed suicide on 4th October, 1903, at little over twenty-three years, in the house in which Beethoven used to live in Vienna.
His book, not without importance in numerous suggestions thrown out as side-issues, can teach us nothing valid about woman, it is not really a book; it is a human document. In it we see for the first time the wild and sustained outcry of the young against the overwhelming physical and emotional charm of the woman. The fierce prudishness of incipient manhood, which the Greeks symbolised in the myths of Adonis, that poor, passionate, and deeply learned youth attempted to symbolise in a treatise. Adonis was torn to pieces by a wild boar; his modern replica was his own wild boar. His book may rank with Rousseau's "Confessions." It cannot be considered a serious contribution to our knowledge of Woman.

Herald (Melbourne, Vic. : 1861 - 1954), Saturday 17 March 1906, page 3