About Weininger’s Texts

Wilhelm Braumüller Verlag, a noted academic publisher in Vienna, first published Geschlecht und Charakter. Janik and Veigl describe the spectacular posthumous success this way:

In May 1903 the first edition appeared [Weininger died October 4th], in November the second, with the authors corrections, in January 1904 the third, in September the fourth, in October the fifth, in December the sixth, in May 1905 the seventh, in February 1906 the eighth, in January 1907 the ninth, in February 1908 the tenth, in February 1909 the eleventh, in May 1910 the twelfth, in December 1911 the thirteenth, in May 1914 the fourteenth, in February 1916 the fifteenth, in February 1917 the sixteenth, in May 1918 the seventeenth, in January 1919 the eighteenth, in June 1919 the nineteenth, in May 1920 the twentieth. In January 1925 there appeared the “26th unchanged edition,” it seems that nobody ever took note of the fact that Weininger himself had corrected the first edition and that there were differences, even some important ones, between the first and later editions. Be that as it may, in 1947 Braumüller had arrived at the 28th edition.¹

In 1980 a new German edition of Geschlecht und Charakter was issued for which Elias Canetti was asked to write an introduction. He was certainly familiar with Weininger’s writing, as with that of his near contemporaries, having been deeply influenced in his youth by one of Weininger’s great champions in Vienna, Karl Kraus² and satirized Weiningerites in Auto-da-fé. Canetti refused, supposedly, because the book was something of a hopeless case.³ He would, to say the least, have been an odd choice for writing an introduction to Weininger's book in light of his confessed aversion to philosophy and abstract ideas in general.⁴

Sex & Character, the anonymous translation of Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter was first published by William Heinemann / G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1906 and later reprinted in 1975 by AMS Press and most recently in 2003 by Howard Fertig. It is famously inaccurate and incomplete. Wittgenstein, while recommending the book, called the translation “beastly” in a letter to G. E. Moore.⁵ (It is hard to imagine Moore finding anything amenable in the book, no matter how well translated.) For nearly a century it has been the only translation available to the English-speaking world. Lame as it may be, it has entered the popular and scholarly literature as is, and it is important for the reason, if no other, that its pages have been cited so many times.

A new and complete translation by Ladislaus Löb has been published by Indiana University Press (2005). It contains over 100 pages of notes and numerous passages that were entirely left out of the Heinemann publication as well as corrections of many minor and major mistranslations.

Robert Willis now offers an interlinear translation of the entire text together with the German here.

A facsimile of the 1906 Heinzmann edition is available online at:
http://historical.library.cornell.edu/index.html in the Historic Monographs Collection.

Kevin Solway has kept a version of the anonymous translation available for download since the early days of the Internet at “Otto Weininger on the Internet” along with other valuable Weininger-related resources.

What distinguishes the version of the text presented here, aside from a number of silently corrected typographical errors and italicization of titles, are the hypertext index, a search function, and the facility for linking to any given page or paragraph. Much of this work is in preparation for the task of cross-indexing passages in Bianco Luno’s Notes and Meditations on Weininger—a project involving annotation and commentary on nearly every paragraph of Sex & Character, some of it historical and exegetical, while other pieces amount to philosophical forays in their own right into the darker reaches of philosophy, particularly, the foundations of moral theory.

Steven Burns has translated Weininger’s final thoughts under the title, A Translation of Weininger’s Über die letzten Dinge (1904/1907)/On Last Things published by The Edwin Mellen Press in 2001.

Aphoristic portions of Über die letzten Dinge also appear in Otto Weininger Collected Aphorisms, Notebook, And Letters To A Friend (2000), translated by Martin Dudaniec and Kevin Solway and is available through the “Otto Weininger on the Internet” web site.

Hans Babendreyer has excellent electronic versions of the German texts here including Geschlecht und Charakter, Über die letzten Dinge, and Taschenbuch und Briefe an einen Freund.

Geschlecht und Charackter has been done into Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, English (twice), Italian, French, Spanish, Hungarian, Polish, Dutch, Russian and Hebrew.

¹ Allan S. Janik and Hans Veigl, Wittgenstein in Vienna: A Biographical Excursion through the City and its History, (New York: Springer Wien, 1998), 207.

² Elias Canetti, The Memoirs of Elias Canetti, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 384.

³ Allan Janik, Essays on Wittgenstein and Weininger, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1985), 97. For an indication of just how hopeless Weininger’s case can seem, see also Hannelore Schröder, “Anti-semitism and Anti-feminism Again: The Dissemination of Otto Weiningers Sex and Character in the Seventies and Eighties,” Empirical Logic and Public Debate, Eric C. W. Krabbe, Renee Jose Dalitz, and Pier A. Smit, eds. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993).

⁴ Canetti, op cit., 325, 603.

⁵ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, edited by G. H. von Wright (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 159.

You may create an URL that links to a specific page in the text by noting the part, chapter, and page number of the desired target of your link and substituting this information in place of the colored text in:

<a href="http://www.phlogma.com/aporia/wein/sc/chap-[part, i.e., “i” for Part I, “ii” for Part II][chapter number in Arabic numerals].htm#p[page number in Arabic numerals]">Your link text here.< /a>

Leave no spaces in the URL. For example,

<a href="http://www.phlogma.com/aporia/wein/sc/chap-ii10.htm#p221">Sex & Character, p. 221.< /a>

would link to page 221 in Part II, Chapter 10 from anywhere on the Internet.

To link to a specific paragraph in the text, follow the instructions above except that, instead of the page number, note the number of the target paragraph (visible at the extreme right of your screen) and substitute the paragraph number for the page number in the URL, dropping the “p”. For example,

<a href="http://www.phlogma.com/aporia/wein/sc/chap-ii10.htm#618">Sex & Character, par 618.< /a>

would link to paragraph 618 of Sex & Character (which occurs in Part II, Chapter 10) again from anywhere on the Internet.

This site is best experienced using a modern standards-compliant browser. We recommend Firefox, Mozilla 1+, Netscape 6+, Opera 3.6+, or IE 5+ (in that order).

Questions, comments, criticism, and, especially, corrections are appreciated. Contact us here.

Copyright © 2003 Victor Muñoz and Iaia Gombrowicz. All original work and enhancements to the public domain work on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License.