On Last Things
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A TRANSLATION OF WEININGER’S ÜBER DIE LETZTEN DINGE (1904/1907) ON LAST THINGS BY OTTO WEININGER TRANSLATION FROM THE ORIGINAL GERMAN, AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY STEVEN BURNS A TRANSLATION OF WEININGER’S Über die letzten Dinge (1904/1907) / ON LAST THINGS Front cover photograph: “Dualism: Schönbrunn Palace Gardens” copyright © Maggy Burns 2000. A TRANSLATION OF WEININGER’S Über die letzten Dinge (1904/1907) / ON LAST THINGS Otto Weininger (1880-1903) Translated from the original German, and with an introduction by Steven Burns Studies in German Language and Literature Volume 28 The Edwin Mellen Press Lewiston●Queenston●Lampeter Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weininger, Otto, 1880-1903. [Über die letzten Dinge. English] A translation of Weininger's Über die letzten Dinge, 1904-1907, On last things / Otto Weininger ; translated and with an introduction by Steven Burns. p. cm. -- (Studies in German language and literature ; v. 28) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-7734-7400-5 1. Philosophy. I. Title: On last things. II. Burns, Steven (Steven A.M.) III. Title. IV. Series. B3363.W53 U313 2001 193--dc2l 2001030559 This is volume 28 in the continuing series Studies in German Language and Literature Volume 28 ISBN 0-7734-7400-5 SGLL Series ISBN 0-88946-578-0 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2001 Steven Burns All rights reserved. For information contact The Edwin Mellen Press Box 450 Lewiston, New York USA 14092-0450 The Edwin Mellen Press Box 67 Queenston, Ontario CANADA LOS 1LO The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd. Lampeter, Ceredigion, Wales UNITED KINGDOM SA48 8LT Printed in the United States of America For Janet TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface: by Allan Janik ix Acknowledgements xiii Introduction: by Steven Burns xv Selected Bibliography xl 1 Peer Gynt and Ibsen 1 (Remarks on the erotic, hate and love, crime, and the ideas of father and son) 2 Aphoristic Remainders 41 (The psychology of sadism and masochism, the psychology of murder, remarks about ethics, original sin, etc.) 3 Characterology 67 (Seekers and Priests; Friedrich Schiller, and Fragments about R. Wagner and Parsifal) 4 The Unidirectionality of Time 81 and its ethical significance, along with speculation about time, space, and the will Retrograde motions 82 The time problem 87 Appendix 94 5 Metaphysics 95 (the idea of a universal symbolism, animal psychology {with a fairly complete psychology of the criminal}, etc.) Metaphysics 96 Psychology of the criminal 98 Animal psychology: the dog 103 the horse 106 general remarks 107 Plants 109 Inorganic nature 110 6 Culture 113 and its relation to believing, fearing and knowing The essence of science 114 The concept of culture 128 Science viewed from the perspective of culture 135 7 Final Aphorisms 147 Appendix: letters to friends 153 Preface Despite his (largely undeserved) reputation as proof positive of fin de siècle Vienna's decadence, and despite the huge influence he exerted upon many of the cretinous minds of his age, Otto Weininger merits the attention of anyone seriously interested in Old Vienna. So, if we need to be reminded of why we should welcome the translation of Weininger's posthumous collected writings, Über die letzten Dinge, we need but look to Ludwig Wittgenstein's friend and collaborator both in writing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and in building the Stonborough house, Paul Engelmann. For Engelmann not even the scathingly witty apocalyptic satirist, Kraus, was as important a critic of the foibles of Old Vienna as Weininger. Thus Engelmann would write, “[Karl] Kraus was (after Weininger) the first to raise an earnest voice of warning, reminding an epoch given to judging life as well as art by one-sided aesthetic canons that the morality of an artist is vital to his work”. Engelmann's testimony is particularly important here because he was in the very center of what Stephen Toulmin and I once called “Wittgenstein's Vienna”. Having been the first assistant in the Adolf Loos Bauschule as well as Loos's favorite pupil, and personal secretary to Karl Kraus at the time when he wrote The Last Days of Mankind as well as helping Wittgenstein to articulate his most important ideas about mysticism, the unity of ethics and aesthetics and the like, Engelmann's view that Weininger was the moral center of The City of Dreams should carry considerable weight. Furthermore, for the Israeli, Engelmann, contrary to many people writing today, Weininger was anything but a fanatic misogynist or anti-Semite, whatever impact his Sex and Character might have had in dubious circles; rather he was the moral voice of a whole gen- ix eration of “critical modernists” who reacted strongly against the superficialities of Viennese aestheticist subjectivism and irrationalism. Weininger, like Kraus, sought to dismantle the “romanticism of nerves” that was Viennese modernism from within, i.e., by challenging the philosophical foundations of Viennese hedonism and sentimental scurrility. Yet, however true all that may be of Weininger in general, it does not bring us closer to understanding why Weininger's posthumous miscellany, On Last Things, is of particular significance for our understanding Vienna 1900. To correct that impression there are at least three important reasons for welcoming On Last Things. First, it shows Weininger at his best in the penetrating essay on Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, with which the book opens. Second, it was his analysis of the logic and the morality of the criminal mind that stimulated Wittgenstein to his thoughts about mysticism and the limits of language in the Tractatus. Third, as a considerably more accessible book than his succès de scandale, Sex and Character, it was influential to the point that some scholars such as the eminent Pari- sian Germanist, Gerald Stieg, believe that it actually had a stronger impact on thought and letters than Sex and Character. Let us look a little closer at each of these points. The Ibsen essay is the most polished piece in the volume. It exhibits a profound knowledge both of Ibsen's oeuvre and of its place in western literature. Further, Weininger's Kantian reading of Peer Gynt anticipates modern philosophical interpretations of the Norwegian bard such as those of Bruce Shapiro in Divine Madness and The Absurd Paradox and Brian Johnston in Text and Super-Text In Ibsen's Drama (although they respectively try to link Ibsen to Kierkegaard and Hegel rather than Kant). In any case, Weininger certainly anticipates Johnston's notion that there is a philosophical “supertext” to Ibsen's drama. The essay is in fact Weininger's fullest account of what he takes to be the main problem that motivated him to write Sex and Character: the question of how there can be moral relations between the sexes. As far as his influence upon Wittgenstein goes there is increasing evidence that the most dramatic development in Wittgenstein's thought on the way to the Tractatus came in the summer of 1916 in connection with his confrontation with Weininger's ideas about the nihilistic character of egoism in the section of his fragmentary essay on what he termed “metaphysics” called “animal psychology”. x Furthermore, Weininger's notion that the essence of immorality is failure to recognize one's limitations reverberates not only through the Tractatus but throughout all of Wittgenstein's thought. As to Professor Stieg's point about On Last Things being perhaps even more influential than Sex and Character, it would take us far afield to do more than mention some of the best-known cases of Weininger's influence upon major figures. These include writers such as Franz Kafka and Hermann Broch as well as other culturally significant figures such as the composer Arnold Schoenberg or the philosopher Karl Popper. The point is that it is much more likely that such figures would be drawn to the more readable of Weininger's two books. In the case of Schoenberg, for example, praise of Weininger is linked to the critique of a society in which the idea of comfort is a fundamental value. This notion is only implicit in Sex and Character but is central to his discussion of Peer Gynt in On Last Things. These considerations by no means exhaust the question of the significance of On Last Things but should serve as a reminder of why we should be happy to see the text finally available in a reliable English translation some hundred years after its original publication. Allan Janik The Brenner Archives The University of Innsbruck xi xii Acknowledgements When I first set out to spend a research leave in Vienna, in 1977, I learned of Otto Weininger from Janik and Toulmin's Wittgenstein's Vienna. Ludwig Wittgenstein's Vermischte Bemerkungen was published at the same time, and I learned from it the extent of Wittgenstein's acknowledged debt to Weininger. In the following term, the late Peter Winch, who had supervised my doctoral thesis, was in Vienna. I worked a little with him on his translation of Vermischte Bemerkungen (as Culture and Value). Those events led me to think that it would be worthwhile making Weininger's second book available in English. It was more than a decade later, however, before I published a translation of the “Metaphysics” chapter. I am grateful to many people whom I had occasion to thank at that time, and to the editor of the Journal of Philosophical Research for permission to re-use that chapter here, with minor alterations. I thought I had done with Weininger, but after another decade, and some signs of renewed interest in him from anglophone commentators who knew only Sex and Character, I had another chance to spend time in Vienna, and decided to finish what I had started.