Is he our guy?

Weininger's idea of Universal Genius is really one of the greatest parts of Sex & Character. I have an entire document saved just made out of quotes from S & C.

He also came up with the idea that both Male & Female traits exists in the same personality, just in different proportion. People who write him off as a misogynist totally miss out on that part. He was probably more progressive than those around him at the time.

He has some amazing thoughts that a person who was so hardcore about Logic like Wittgenstein would find resonant with

Pure logical thought cannot occur in the case of men; it would be an attribute of
deity. A human being must always think partly psychologically because he possesses
not only reason but also senses, and his thought cannot free itself from temporal
experiences but must remain bound by them. Logic, however, is the supreme standard
by which the individual can test his own psychological ideas and those of others.
When two men are discussing anything it is the conception and not the varying
individual presentations of it that they aim at. The conception, then, is the standard of
value for the individual presentations. The mode in which the psychological
generalisation comes into existence is quite independent of the conceptions and has
no significance in respect to it. The logical character which invests the conception
with dignity and power is not derived from experience, for experience can give only
vague and wavering generalisations. Absolute constancy and absolute coherence
which cannot come from experience are the essence of the conception of that power
concealed in the depths of the human mind whose handiwork we try hard but in vain
to see in nature. Conceptions are the only true realities, and the conception is not in
nature; it is the rule of the essence not of the actual existence.

When I enunciate the proposition A = A, the meaning of the proposition is not that
a special individual A of experience or of thought is like itself. The judgment of
identity does not depend on the existence of an A. It means only that if an A exists, or
even if it does not exist, then A = A. Something is posited, the existence of A = A
whether or no A itself exists. It cannot be the result of experience, as Mill supposed,
for it is independent of the existence of A. But an existence has been posited; it is not
the existence of the object; it must be the existence of the subject. The reality of the
existence is not in the first A or the second A, but in the simultaneous identity of the
two. And so the proposition A = A is no other than the proposition “I am.”

From the psychological point of view, the real meaning of the proposition of
identity is not so difficult to interpret. It is clear that to be able to say A = A, to
establish the permanence of the conception through the changes of experience, there
must be something unchangeable, and this can be only the subject. Were I part of the
stream of change I could not verify that the A had remained unchanged, had remained
itself. Were I part of the change, I could not recognise the change. Fichte was right
when he stated that the existence of the ego was to be found concealed in pure logic,
inasmuch as the ego is the condition of intelligible existence.

The logical axioms are the principle of all truth. These posit an existence towards
which all cognition serves. Logic is a law which must be obeyed, and man realises
himself only in so far as he is logical. He finds himself in cognition.

All error must be felt to be crime. And so man must not err. He must find the truth,
and so he can find it. The duty of cognition involves the possibility of cognition, the
freedom of thought, and the hope of ascertaining truth. In the fact that logic is the
condition of the mind lies the proof that thought is free and can reach its goal.

Lol

Truth, purity, faithfulness, uprightness, with reference to oneself; these give the
only conceivable ethics. Duty is only duty to oneself, duty of the empirical ego to the
intelligible ego. These appear in the form of two imperatives that will always put to
shame every kind of psychologismus – the logical law and the moral law. The
internal direction, the categorical imperatives of logic and morality which dominate
all the codes of social utilitarianism are factors that no empiricism can explain. All
empiricism and scepticism, positivism and relativism, instinctively feel that their
principal difficulties lie in logic and ethics. And so perpetually renewed and fruitless
efforts are made to explain this inward discipline empirically and psychologically.
Logic and ethics are fundamentally the same, they are no more than duty to oneself.
They celebrate their union by the highest service of truth, which is overshadowed in
the one case by error, in the other by untruth. All ethics are possible only by the laws
of logic, and logic is no more than the ethical side of law. Not only virtue, but also
insight, not only sanctity but also wisdom, are the duties and tasks of mankind.
Through the union of these alone comes perfection.

Ethics, however, the laws of which are postulates, cannot be made the basis of a
logical proof of existence. Ethics are not logical in the same sense that logic is ethical.
Logic proves the absolute actual existence of the ego; ethics control the form which
the actuality assumes. Ethics dominate logic and make logic part of their contents.

Consider how much deeper a great poet can reach into the nature of man than an
average person. Think of the extraordinary number of characters depicted by
Shakespeare or Euripides, or the marvellous assortment of human beings that fill the
pages of Zola. After the Penthesilea, Heinrich von Kleist created Kätchen von
Heilbronn, and Michael Angelo embodied from his imagination the Delphic Sibyls
and the Leda. There have been few men so little devoted to art as Kant and Schelling,
and yet these have written most profoundly and truly about it. In order to depict a
man one must understand him, and to understand him one must be like him; in order
to portray his psychological activities one must be able to reproduce them in oneself.
To understand a man one must have his nature in oneself. One must be like the mind
one tries to grasp. It takes a thief to know a thief, and only an innocent man can
understand another innocent man. The poseur only understands other poseurs, and
sees nothing but pose in the actions of others; whilst the simple-minded fails to
understand the most flagrant pose. To understand a man is really to be that man.

It would seem to follow that a man can best understand himself – a conclusion
plainly absurd. No one can understand himself, for to do that he would have to get
outside himself; the subject of the knowing and willing activity would have to
become its own object. To grasp the universe it would be necessary to get a
standpoint outside the universe, and the possibility of such a standpoint is
incompatible with the idea of a universe. He who could understand himself could
understand the world. I do not make the statement merely as an explanation: it
contains an important truth, to the significance of which I shall recur. For the present
I am content to assert that no one can understand his deepest, most intimate nature.

This happens in actual practice; when one wishes to understand in a general way, it is
always from other persons, never oneself, that one gets one's materials. The other
person chosen must be similar in some respect, however different as a whole; and,
making use of this similarity, he can recognise, represent, comprehend. So far as one
understands a man, one is that man.

The man of genius takes his place in the above argument as he who understands
incomparably more other beings than the average man. Goethe is said to have said of
himself that there was no vice or crime of which he could not trace the tendency in
himself, and that at some period of his life he could not have understood fully. The
genius, therefore, is a more complicated, more richly endowed, more varied man; and
a man is the closer to being a genius the more men he has in his personality, and the
more really and strongly he has these others within him. If comprehension of those
about him only flickers in him like a poor candle, then he is unable, like the great
poet, to kindle a mighty flame in his heroes, to give distinction and character to his
creations. The ideal of an artistic genius is to live in all men, to lose himself in all
men, to reveal himself in multitudes; and so also the aim of the philosopher is to
discover all others in himself, to fuse them into a unit which is his own unit.

This protean character of genius is no more simultaneous than the bi-sexuality of
which I have spoken. Even the greatest genius cannot understand the nature of all
men at the same time, on one and the same day. The comprehensive and manifold
rudiments which a man possesses in his mind can develop only slowly and by degrees
with the gradual unfolding of his whole life. It appears almost as if there were a
definite periodicity in his development. These periods, when they recur, however, are
not exactly alike; they are not mere repetitions, but are intensifications of their
predecessors, on a higher plane. No two moments in the life of an individual are
exactly alike; there is between the later and the earlier periods only the similarity of
the higher and lower parts of a spiral ascent. Thus it has frequently happened that
famous men have conceived a piece of work in their early youth, laid it aside during
manhood, and resumed and completed it in old age. Periods exist in every man, but in
different degrees and with varying "amplitude." Just as the genius is the man who
contains in himself the greatest number of others in the most active way, so the
amplitude of a man's periods will be the greater the wider his mental relations may
be. Illustrious men have often been told, by their teachers, in their youth “that they
were always in one extreme or another.” As if they could be anything else! These
transitions in the case of unusual men often assume the character of a crisis. Goethe
once spoke of the “recurrence of puberty” in an artist. The idea is obviously to be
associated with the matter under discussion.

>When I enunciate the proposition A = A, the meaning of the proposition is not that
a special individual A of experience or of thought is like itself. The judgment of
identity does not depend on the existence of an A. It means only that if an A exists, or
even if it does not exist, then A = A. Something is posited, the existence of A = A
whether or no A itself exists. It cannot be the result of experience, as Mill supposed,
for it is independent of the existence of A. But an existence has been posited; it is not
the existence of the object; it must be the existence of the subject. The reality of the
existence is not in the first A or the second A, but in the simultaneous identity of the
two. And so the proposition A = A is no other than the proposition “I am.”

Somewhere in there I discern something tantamount to Wittgenstein's proposition that the world is the totality of facts, not things.

It results from their periodicity that, in men of genius, sterile years precede
productive years, these again to be followed by sterility, the barren periods being
marked by psychological self-depreciation, by the feeling that they are less than other
men; times in which the remembrance of the creative periods is a torment, and when
they envy those who go about undisturbed by such penalties. Just as his moments of
ecstasy are more poignant, so are the periods of depression of a man of genius more
intense than those of other men. Every great man has such periods, of longer or
shorter duration, times in which he loses self-confidence, in which he thinks of
suicide; times in which, indeed, he may be sowing the seeds of a future harvest, but
which are devoid of the stimulus to production; times which call forth the blind
criticisms “How such a genius is degenerating!” “How he has played himself out!”
“How he repeats himself!” and so forth.

It is possible that my introductory description of the genius will be repudiated
indignantly, because it would imply that a Shakespeare has the vulgarity of his
Falstaff, the rascality of his Iago, the boorishness of his Caliban, and because it
identifies great men with all the low and contemptible things that they have described.
As a matter of fact, men of genius do conform to my description, and as their
biographies show, are liable to the strangest passions and the most repulsive instincts.
And yet the objection is invalid, as the fuller exposition of the thesis will reveal. Only
the most superficial survey of the argument could support it, whilst the exactly
opposite conclusion is a much more likely inference. Zola, who has so faithfully
described the impulse to commit murder, did not himself commit a murder, because
there were so many other characters in him. The actual murderer is in the grasp of his
own disposition: the author describing the murder is swayed by a whole kingdom of
impulses. Zola would know the desire for murder much better than the actual
murderer would know it, he would recognise it in himself, if it really came to the
surface in him, and he would be prepared for it. In such ways the criminal instincts in
great men are intellectualised and turned to artistic purposes as in the case of Zola, or
to philosophic purposes as with Kant, but not to actual crime.

The presence of a multitude of possibilities in great men has important
consequences connected with the theory of henids that I elaborated in the last chapter.
A man understands what he already has within himself much more quickly than what
is foreign to him (were it otherwise there would be no intercourse possible: as it is we
do not realise how often we fail to understand one another). To the genius, who
understands so much more than the average man, much more will be apparent.

The history of the human race (naturally I mean the history of its mind and not
merely its wars) is readily intelligible on the theory of the appearance of genius, and
of the imitation by the more monkey-like individuals of the conduct of those with
genius. The chief stages, no doubt, were house- building, agriculture, and above all,
speech. Every single word has been the invention of a single man, as, indeed, we still
see, if we leave out of consideration the merely technical terms. How else could
language have arisen? The earliest words were “onomatopoetic”; a sound similar to
the exciting cause was evolved almost without the will of the speaker, in direct
response to the sensuous stimulation. All the other words were originally metaphors,
or comparisons, a kind of primitive poetry, for all prose has come from poetry. Many,
perhaps the majority of the greatest geniuses, have remained unknown. Think of the
proverbs, now almost commonplaces, such as “one good turn deserves another.”
These were said for the first time by some great man. How many quotations from the
classics, or sayings of Christ, have passed into the common language, so that we have
to think twice before we can remember who were the authors of them. Language is as
little the work of the multitude as our ballads. Every form of speech owes much that
is not acknowledged to individuals of another language. Because of the universality
of genius, the words and phrases that he invents are useful not only to those who use
the language in which he wrote them. A nation orients itself by its own geniuses, and
derives from them its ideas of its own ideals, but the guiding star serves also as a light
to other nations. As speech has been created by a few great men, the most
extraordinary wisdom lies concealed in it, a wisdom which reveals itself to a few
ardent explorers but which is usually overlooked by the stupid professional
philologists.

The genius is not a critic of language, but its creator, as he is the creator of all the
mental achievements which are the material of culture and which make up the
objective mind, the spirit of the peoples. The “timeless” men are those who make
history, for history can be made only by those who are not floating with the stream. It
is only those who are unconditioned by time who have real value, and whose
productions have an enduring force. And the events that become forces of culture
become so only because they have an enduring value.

What also always leads to determinism is the fact that struggle is made necessary continuously. In a particular case the decision may follow quite ethically, and man may decide himself for the Good; yet the decision is not lasting, he must struggle anew. There is freedom, one might say, only for the moment.

And that lies in the concept of a freedom. For what kind of a freedom would it be which I, through a good act from some earlier time, had brought forth, caused, for all time? It is the very pride of man that he can be free anew at every moment.

So for the future, as for the past, there is no freedom; man has no power over them.

That is why man can also never understand himself: For he is himself a timeless act; an act which he performs continuously, and there is no moment in which he might not perform it, as there would have to be to understand himself.

Morality expresses itself thus: Act in full consciousness, that is, act so that in every moment you are whole, your entire individuality is there. Man experiences this individuality over the course of his life only in successive moments: that is why time is immoral and no living person ever holy, perfect. If man once acts with the strongest will so that all universality of his self (and of the world, for he is indeed the microcosm) is set in the moment, then has he overcome time and become divine.

The most powerful musical motifs of the world’s music are those which attempt to represent this breaking through time within time, this breaking forth out of time, where such an ictus falls on one note that it absorbs the remaining parts of the melody (which represent time as a whole, individual points integrated by the I) and thereby transcends the melody. The end of the Grail motif in Parsifal, and the Siegfried motif, are such melodies

There is however one act which, so to speak, reabsorbs the future into itself, experiences in advance all future falling back into immorality already as guilt, no less than all past immorality, and thereby surpasses both: a timeless positing of character, rebirth. It is the act through which genius arises.

witty must have loved this

this too

Lol

homie can you email me that sheeit dawg. [email protected]. btw do you have commonplace books/docs too then?

It is a moral demand that in every action the whole individuality of the person should become apparent, each should be a complete overcoming of time, of the unconscious, and of the narrowness of consciousness. Most of the time however, man does not do what he wills, but what he has willed. Through his decisions, he always gives himself only a certain direction, in which he then moves until the next moment of reflection. We do not will continuously, we only will intermittently, piece by piece. We thus save ourselves from willing: principle of the economy of the will. But the higher man always experiences this as thoroughly immoral. Present and eternity are connected; timeless, universal, logical reasonings have the form of the present (logic is achieved ethics): and so also should all eternity lie in every present. We also must not determine ourselves from within; this last danger too, this last deceptive appearance of autonomy, is to be avoided.

Just read Sex & Character already. All of my quotes came from there. It's a really short book anyway, but the sheer amount of power that it contains is amazing.

theabsolute.net/ottow/sexcharh.html

Of course you also have to deal with the stereotypical misogynist & racist stuff that appears, and simply aren't as good as these sections on Genius.

This brings us in another fashion to the subject of the last chapter, and to another
reason for the great memories of genius. The more significant a man is, the more
different personalities he unites in himself, the more interests that are contained in
him, the more wide his memory must be. All men have practically the same
opportunities of perception, but the vast majority of men apprehend only an
infinitesimal part of what they have perceived. The ideal genius is one in whom
perception and apprehension are identical in their field. Of course no such being
actually exists. On the other hand, there is no man who has apprehended nothing that
he has perceived. In this way we may take it that all degrees of genius (not talent)
exist; no male is quite without a trace of genius. Complete genius is an ideal; no man
is absolutely without the quality, and no man possesses it completely. Apprehension
or absorption, and memory or retention, vary together in their extent and their
permanence. There is an uninterrupted gradation from the man whose mentality is
unconnected from moment to moment, and to whom no incidents can signify
anything because there is within him nothing to compare them with (such an extreme,
of course, does not exist) to the fully developed minds for which everything is
unforgettable, because of the firm impressions made and the sureness with which they
are absorbed. The extreme genius also does not exist, because even the greatest
genius is not wholly a genius at every moment of his life.

It follows also that from one’s own experience, from what one has thought or said,
heard or read, felt or done, one can give the smallest possible to another, that the
other does not already know. Consideration of the amount that a man can take in from
another would seem to serve as a sort of objective measure of his genius, a measure
that does not have to wait for an estimation of his actual creative efforts. I am not
going to discuss the extent to which this theory opposes current views on education,
but I recommend parents and teachers to pay attention to it. The extent to which a
man can detect differences and resemblances must depend on his memories. This
faculty will be best developed in those whose past permeates their present, all the
moments of the life of whom are amalgamated. Such persons will have the greatest
opportunities of detecting resemblances and so finding the material for comparisons.
They will always seize hold of from the past what has the greatest resemblance to the
present experience, and the two experiences will be combined in such a way that no
similarities or differences will be concealed. And so they are able to maintain the past
against the influence of the present. It is not without reason that from time
immemorial the special merit of poetry has been considered to be its richness in
beautiful comparisons and pictures, or that we turn to again and again, or await our
favourite images with impatience when we read Homer or Shakespeare or
Kloppstock. To-day when, for the first time for a century and a half, Germany is
without great poets or painters, and when none the less it is impossible to find any
one who is not an “author,” the power of clear and beautiful comparison seems to
have gone. A period the nature of which can best be described in vague and dubious
words, the philosophy of which has become in more than one sense the philosophy of
the unconscious can contain nothing great. Consciousness is the mark of greatness,
and before it the unconscious is dispersed as the sun disperses a mist. If only
consciousness were to come to this age, how quickly voices that are now famous
would become silent. It is only in full consciousness, in which the experience of the
present assumes greater intensity by its union with all the experiences of the past, that
imagination, the necessary quality for all philosophical as for all artistic effort, can
find a place.

The request for an autobiography would put most men into a most painful position;
they could scarcely tell if they were asked what they had done the day before.
Memory with most people is quite spasmodic and purely associative. In the case of
the man of genius every impression that he has received endures; he is always under
the influence of his impressions; and so nearly all men of genius tend to suffer from
fixed ideas. The psychical condition of men's minds may be compared with a set of
bells close together, and so arranged that in the ordinary man a bell rings only when
one beside it sounds, and the vibration lasts only a moment. In the genius, when a bell
sounds it vibrates so strongly that it sets in action the whole series, and remains in
action throughout life. The latter kind of movement often gives rise to extraordinary
conditions and absurd impulses, that may last for weeks together and that form the
basis of the supposed kinship of genius with insanity.

The result of self-observation shows that sleep, the limitations of consciousness, the
gaps in memory, even special experiences, appear to be in some mysterious way one
great whole; incidents do not follow each other like the tickings of a watch, but they
pass along in a single unbroken stream. With ordinary men the moments which are
united in a close continuity out of the original discrete multiplicity are very few, and
the course of their lives resembles a little brook, whereas with the genius it is more
like a mighty river into which all the little rivulets flow from afar; that is to say, the
universal comprehension of genius vibrates to no experience in which all the
individual moments have not been gathered up and stored.

Why are Something and Nothing always drawn to each other? Why are people born, why does man want woman? The problem of love, as we see here, is the problem of the world, the problem of life, the deepest, most insoluble problem, the urge of form to form matter, the urge of the timeless to time, of the spaceless to space. We meet this problem everywhere: it is the relationship of freedom to necessity. The dualism in the world is the inconceivable: the motif of original sin is the mystery, basis, meaning and purpose of the fall from timeless being, from eternal life into nonbeing, into the life of the senses, into earthly temporality; the fall of the guilt-free into guilt. I am never able to comprehend why I committed the original sin, how the free could become unfree. And why?

Because I can only recognize a sin when I am no longer committing it. Therefore I cannot comprehend life so long as I am living it, and time is the mystery because I have not yet overcome it. Only death can teach me the meaning of life. I stand in time and not above it, I still posit time, still long for non-being, still desire material life; and because I remain in this sin, I am not capable of comprehending it. What I know, I already stand outside of. I cannot comprehend my sinfulness, because I am still sinful.

The criminal and the insane live discontinuously.

Duty is only towards oneself; Kant must have realised this in his earlier days when
first he felt an impulse to lie. Except for a few indications in Nietzsche, and in Stirner,
and a few others, Ibsen alone seems to have grasped the principle of the Kantian
ethics (notably in “Brand” and “Peer Gynt”). The following two quotations also give
the Kantian view in a general way : First Nebbel’s epigram, “Lies and Truth.”

“Which do you pay dearer for, lies or the truth? The former costs you yourself, the
latter at most your happiness.’

Next, the well-known words of Sleika from the “Westöstlichen Diwan”:

All sorts go to make a world,
The crowd and the rogue and the hero;
But the highest fortune of earth’s children
Is always in their own personality.
It matters little how a man lives
If only he is true to himself;
It matters nothing what a man may lose
If he remains what he really is.

It is certainly true that most men need some kind of a God. A few, and they are the
men of genius, do not bow to an alien law. The rest try to justify their doings and
misdoings, their thinking and existence (at least the menial side of it), to some one
else, whether it be the personal God of the Jews, or a beloved, respected, and revered
human being. It is only in this way that they can bring their lives under the social law.

There has been no famous man who, at least some time in the course of his life, and
generally earlier in proportion to his greatness, has not had a moment in which he was
absolutely convinced of the possession of an ego in the highest sense.

Let us compare the following utterances of three very great geniuses.

Jean Paul relates in his autobiographical sketch, “Truths from my own Life” :

“I can never forget a circumstance which, so far, has been related by no one – the
birth of my own self-consciousness, the time and place of which I can tell. One
morning I was standing, as a very young child, at the front door, and looking towards
the wood-shed I suddenly saw, all at once my inner likeness. 'I' am 'I' flashed like
lightning from the skies across me, and since then has remained. I saw myself then for
the first time and for ever. This cannot be explained as a confusion of memory, for no
alien narrative could have blended itself with this sacred event, preserved permanently
in my memory by its vividness and novelty.”

Novalis, in his “Miscellaneous Fragments,” refers to an identical experience:

“This factor every one must experience for himself. It is a factor of the higher
order, and reveals itself only to higher men; but men should strive to induce it in
themselves. Philosophy is the exercise of this factor, it is a true self-revelation, the
stimulation of the real ego by the ideal ego. It is the foundation of all other
revelations; the resolution to philosophise is a challenge to the actual ego, to become
conscious of itself, to grow and to become a soul.”

Schelling discusses the same phenomenon in his “Philosophical Letters upon
Dogmatism and Criticism,” a little known early work, in which occurs the following
beautiful words:

“In all of us there dwells a secret marvellous power of freeing ourselves from the
changes of time, of withdrawing to our secret selves away from external things, and of
so discovering to ourselves the eternal in us in the form of unchangeability. This
presentation of ourselves to ourselves is the most truly personal experience upon
which depends everything that we know of the supra-sensual world. This presentation
shows us for the first time what real existence is, whilst all else only appears to be. It
differs from every presentation of the sense in its perfect freedom, whilst all other
presentations are bound, being overweighted by the burden of the object. Still there
exists for those who have not this perfect freedom of the inner sense some approach to
it, experiences approaching it from which they may gain some faint idea of it. . . .
This intellectual presentation occurs when we cease to be our own object, when,
withdrawing into ourselves, the perceiving self merges in the self-perceived. At that
moment we annihilate time and duration of time; we are no longer in time, but time,
or rather eternity itself, is in us. The external world is no longer an object for us, but is
lost in us.”

Every great man knows this phase of the ego. He may become conscious of it first
through the love of a woman, for the great man loves more intensely than the ordinary
man; or it may be from the contrast given by a sense of guilt or the knowledge of
having failed; these, too, the great man feels more intensely than smaller-minded
people. It may lead him to a sense of unity with the all, to the seeing of all things in
God, or, and this is more likely, it may reveal to him the frightful dualism of nature
and spirit in the universe, and produce in him the need, the craving, for a solution of
it, for the secret inner wonder. But always it leads the great man to the beginning of a
presentation of the world for himself and by himself, without the help of the thought
of others.

This intuitive vision of the world is not a great synthesis elaborated at his writingtable
in his library from all the books that have been written; it is something that has
been experienced, and as a whole it is clear and intelligible, although details may still
be obscure and contradictory. The excitation of the ego is the only source of this
intuitive vision of the world as a whole in the case of the artist as in that of the
philosopher. And, however different they may be, if they are really intuitive visions
of the cosmos, they have this in common, something that comes only from the
excitation of the ego, the faith that every great man possesses, the conviction of his
possession of an “I” or soul, which is solitary in the universe, which faces the
universe and comprehends it.

From the time of this first excitation of his ego, the great man, in spite of lapses due
to the most terrible feeling, the feeling of mortality, will live in and by his soul.
And it is for this reason, as well as from the sense of his creative powers, that the
great man has so intense a self- consciousness. Nothing can be more unintelligent
than to talk of the modesty of great men, of their inability to recognise what is within
them. There is no great man who does not well know how far he differs from others
(except during these periodical fits of depression to which I have already alluded).
Every great man feels himself to be great as soon as he has created something; his
vanity and ambition are, in fact, always so great that he over-estimates himself.
Schopenhauer believed himself to be greater than Kant. Nietzsche declared that “Thus
spake Zarathustra” was the greatest book in the world.

There is, however, a side of truth in the assertion that great men are modest. They
are never arrogant. Arrogance and self-realisation are contradictories, and should
never be confused although this is often done. A man has just as much arrogance as he
lacks of self-realisation, and uses it to increase his own self-consciousness by
artificially lowering his estimation of others. Of course the foregoing holds true only
of what may be called physiological, unconscious arrogance; the great man must
occasionally comport himself with what seems rudeness to contemptible persons.

The conception genius concludes universality. If there were an absolute genius (a
convenient fiction) there would be nothing to which he could not have a vivid,
intimate, and complete relation. Genius, as I have already shown, would have
universal comprehension, and through its perfect memory would be independent of
time. To comprehend anything one must have within one something similar. A man
notices, understands, and comprehends only those things with which he has some
kinship. The genius is the man with the most intense, most vivid, most conscious,
most continuous, and most individual ego. The ego is the central point, the unit of
comprehension, the synthesis of all manifoldness.

The ego of the genius accordingly is simply itself universal comprehension, the
centre of infinite space; the great man contains the whole universe within himself;
genius is the living microcosm. He is not an intricate mosaic, a chemical combination
of an infinite number of elements; the argument in chap. iv. as to his relation to other
men and things must not be taken in that sense; he is everything. In him and through
him all psychical manifestations cohere and are real experiences, not an elaborate
piece-work, a whole put together from parts in the fashion of science. For the genius
the ego is the all, lives as the all; the genius sees nature and all existences as whole;
the relations of things flash on him intuitively; he has not to build bridges of stones
between them. And so the genius cannot be an empirical psychologist slowly
collecting details and linking them by associations; he cannot be a physicist,
envisaging the world as a compound of atoms and molecules.

It is absolutely from his vision of the whole, in which the genius always lives, that
he gets his sense of the parts. He values everything within him or without him by the
standard of this vision, a vision that for him is no function of time, but a part of
eternity. And so the man of genius is the profound man, and profound only in
proportion to his genius. That is why his views are more valuable than those of all
others. He constructs from everything his ego that holds the universe, whilst others
never reach a full consciousness of this inner self, and so, for him, all things have
significance, all things are symbolical. For him breathing is something more than the
coming and going of gases through the walls of the capillaries; the blue of the sky is
more than the partial polarisation of diffused and reflected light; snakes are not
merely reptiles that have lost limbs. If it were possible for one single man to have
achieved all the scientific discoveries that have ever been made, if everything that has
been done by the following: Archimedes and Lagrange, Johannes Muller and Karl
Ernst von Baer, Newton and Laplace, Konrad Sprengel and Cuvier, Thucydides and
Niebuhr, Friedrich August Wolf and Franz Bopp, and by many more famous men of
science, could have been achieved by one man in the short span of human life, he
would still not be entitled to the denomination of genius, for none of these have
pierced the depths. The scientist takes phenomena for what they obviously are; the
great man or genius for what they signify. Sea and mountain, light and darkness,
spring and autumn, cypress and palm, dove and swan are symbols to him, he not only
thinks that there is, but he recognises in them something deeper. The ride of the
Valkyrie is not produced by atmospheric pressure and the magic fire is not the
outcome of a process of oxidation.

And all this is possible for him because the outer world is as full and strongly
connected as the inner in him, the external world in fact seems to be only a special
aspect of his inner life; the universe and the ego have become one in him, and he is
not obliged to set his experience together piece by piece according to rule. The
greatest poly-historian, on the contrary, does nothing but add branch to branch and
yet creates no completed structure. That is another reason why the great scientist is
lower that the great artist, the great philosopher. The infinity of the universe is
responded to in the genius by a true sense of infinity in his own breast; he holds chaos
and cosmos, all details and all totality, all plurality, and all singularity in himself.

Although these remarks apply more to genius than to the nature of the productions of
genius, although the occurrence of artistic ecstasy, philosophic conceptions, religious
fervour remain as puzzling as ever, if merely the conditions, not the actual process of
a really great achievement has been made clear, yet this is nevertheless to be the final
definition of genius.

A man may be called a genius when he lives in conscious connection with the
whole universe. It is only then that the genius becomes the really divine spark in
mankind.

All mankind have some of the quality of
genius, and no man has it entirely. Genius is a condition to which one man draws
close whilst another is further away, which is attained by some in early days, but with
others only at the end of life.

The man to whom we have accorded the possession of genius, is only he who has
begun to see, and to open the eyes of others. That they can see with their own eyes
proves that they were only standing before the door.

Even the ordinary man, even as such, can stand in an indirect relationship to
everything: his idea of the “whole” is only a glimpse, he does not succeed in
identifying himself with it. But he is not without the possibility of following this
identification in another, and so attaining a composite image. Through some vision of
the world he can bind himself to the universal, and by diligent cultivation he can
make each detail a part of himself. Nothing is quite strange to him, and in all a band
of sympathy exists between him and the things of the world. It is not so with plants or
animals. They are limited, they do not know the whole but only one element; they do
not populate the whole earth, and where they are widely dispersed it is in the service
of man, who has allotted to them everywhere the same task. They may have a relation
to the sun or to the moon, but they certainly are wanting in respect of the “starry
vault” and “the moral law.” For the latter originates in the soul of man, in which is
hidden all totality, which can see everything because it is universal itself : the starry
heavens and the moral law are fundamentally one and the same. The universalism of
the categorical imperative is the universalism of the universe.

The statement that a great man is most moral towards himself stands on sure
ground; he will not allow alien views to be imposed on him, so obscuring the
judgment of his own ego; he will not passively accept the interpretation of another, of
an alien ego, quite different from his own, and if ever he has allowed himself to be
influenced, the thought will always be painful to him. A conscious lie that he has told
will harass him throughout his life, and he will be unable to shake off the memory in
Dionysian fashion. But men of genius will suffer most when they become aware
afterwards that they have unconsciously helped to spread a lie in their talk or conduct
with others. Other men, who do not possess this organic thirst for truth, are always
deeply involved in lies and errors, and so do not understand the bitter revolt of great
men against the “lie of life.”

The great man, he who stands high, he in whom the ego, unconditioned by time, is
dominant, seeks to maintain his own value in the presence of his intelligible ego by
his intellectual and moral conscience. His pride is towards himself; there is the desire
in him to impress his own self by his thoughts, actions, and creations. This pride is
the pride peculiar to genius, possessing its own standard of value, and it is
independent of the judgment of others, since it possesses in itself a higher tribunal.
Soft and ascetic natures (Pascal is an example) sometimes suffer from this self-pride,
and yet try in vain to shake it off. This self-pride will always be associated with pride
before others, but the two forms are really in perpetual conflict.

We assign sex to human beings from their birth on one character only, and so come to add contradictory ideas to our conceptions. Such a course is illogical.

There is a pitiful monotony in the fashion according to which, on such occasions, “men” and “women” have been treated as if, like red and white balls, they were alike in all respects save colour. In no case has the discussion been confined to an individual case, and as everyone had different individuals in their mind, a real agreement was impossible. As people meant different things by the same words, there was a complete disharmony between language and ideas.

It is only in obedience to the most general, practical demand for a superficial view that we classify, make sharp divisions pick out a single tune from the continuous melody of nature. But the old conceptions of the mind, like the customs of primitive commerce, become foolish in a new age.

Amongst human beings the state of the case is as follows: There exist all sorts of intermediate conditions between male and female – sexual transitional forms… In the same fashion we may suppose the existence of an idea man, M, and of an ideal woman, W, as sexual types although these types do not actually exist. Such types not only can be constructed, but must be constructed. As in art so in science, the real purpose is to reach the type, the Platonic Idea. The science of physics investigates the behaviour of bodies that are absolutely rigid or absolutely elastic, in the full knowledge that neither the one nor the other actually exists. The intermediate conditions actually existing between the two absolute states of matter serve merely as a starting-point for investigation of the “types” and in the practical application of the theory are treated as mixtures and exhaustively analysed. So also there exist only the intermediate stages between absolute males and females, the absolute conditions never presenting themselves… The fact is that males and females are like two substances combined in different proportions, but with either element never wholly missing. We find, so to speak, never either a man or a woman, but only the male condition and the female condition.

(How anyone can possibly read this statement and still find Weininger a 'misogynist' is beyond me)

Weininger is a genius and it's always been amazing to me that he's only regarded as a curiosity in intellectual history at best. If he had been an early 19th century intellectual he would have been a Schelling or Kierkegaard.

It's interesting to read this in light of Wittgenstein's late views on logic as an abstract subset of grammar. I don't know if that's what he saw in Weininger in particular, but I can definitely see a resonance there.

The sheer power comes from its succinctness. His writing isn't particularly obscure in the sense that many others like Kierkegaard or Hegel can be. His misogynistic portions also read better if you take it into account that he was talking about Platonic archetypes rather than the actual gender. Just replace the word 'female' with 'plebs'.

I guess the problem is beyond those few amazing chapters on Genius, he doesn't really have much to his name - since he had to go and kill himself.

if he was born in 1990 he would be a tranny

>women are basically faggots and jews
>t. Otto Weininger
Definitely /our guy/ Tbh

Christ, this has revealed to me far more avenues of Wittgenstein's thought that I hadn't known before.

early 20th century vienna: not even once

>The history of the human race (naturally I mean the history of its mind and not
>merely its wars) is readily intelligible on the theory of the appearance of genius, and
>of the imitation by the more monkey-like individuals of the conduct of those with
>genius.

kek preach

holy shit

Point proven.

Can we replace Stirner with Weininger?

Fuckin stirner. I hate all the fags on this board who think they are him