GENIUS FORUMS

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:Which might have been exactly his main fault or limitation, this incapacity to bear truth. Others would call that another word for ignorance.

It wasn't complete ignorance, because then he wouldn't suffer from knowing the truth to some degree.

jupiviv wrote:It wasn't complete ignorance, because then he wouldn't suffer from knowing the truth to some degree.

Perhaps the following captures it well: one suffers not to the degree that truth is known but actually truth manifests to the degree one is able to suffer it, overcoming and completing it.

Ignorance is a collection of all behavior and tactics to decrease the ability to suffer as well as the ability to overcome it. Suicide is part of that collection but comes in so many flavors that one could argue Weininger was doing what everybody was already doing: dying and dissolving into "atoms", the ultimate criminal disappearing act.

The suicide of the artist isn't the denial of reality but that of his self after expressed? After expressed what is the need of the self? Self, Reality, Suicide.

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:Perhaps the following captures it well: one suffers not to the degree that truth is known but actually truth manifests to the degree one is able to suffer it, overcoming and completing it.

The first part of that statement is correct. I would say one suffers from truth to the degree one wants to stop being aware of it.

Diebert van Rhijn wrote: Otto Weininger: sex, science, and self in imperial Vienna, by Prof. Chandak Sengoopta, University London

Just finished this one. The next in May and the other in June. A coin toss will decide which is next.

Chandak Sengoopta also published a shorter paper on Weininger: "Science, Sexuality, and Gender in the Fin de Siecle: Otto Weininger as Baedeker." I lost the original link but I uploaded it here. Hey Diebert, how's that for an historian analyzing "philosophy"? He has turned Weininger into a tour guide for contemporary thought!

cousinbasil wrote:Chandak Sengoopta also published a shorter paper on Weininger: "Science, Sexuality, and Gender in the Fin de Siecle: Otto Weininger as Baedeker." I lost the original link but I uploaded it here. Hey Diebert, how's that for an historian analyzing "philosophy"? He has turned Weininger into a tour guide for contemporary thought!

He's one of the top tourist attractions in Vienna!

cousinbasil wrote:Chandak Sengoopta also published a shorter paper on Weininger: "Science, Sexuality, and Gender in the Fin de Siecle: Otto Weininger as Baedeker." I lost the original link but I uploaded it here.

That paper is the doctoral dissertation which was revised into the publication I provided the link to earlier. As mentioned in the foreword of the book. Not sure what the revisions exactly are.

cousinbasil wrote:how's that for an historian analyzing "philosophy"?

One example of how confused historians can be in terms of internal logic is the section on Weininger's interest in the topic of sexuality. First it's dragged out that Weininger's psychology professor Dr. Hermann Swoboda, mentioned an unspecified "instinctual deviation" which in his opinion would have been easy to pick up from Weininger's work. Although homosexuality is then said to be excluded by that very Swoboda it doesn't stop Sengoopta to document this very thing in the next paragraph, based only on some obscure psychoanalytic publication from 1928, a field awash of seeing things in some sexually perverted light. Right....

To dig his own intellectual grave a bit deeper, Sengoopta goes on after this initial curve ball to actually describe a "preoccupation with sexual themes" by all Viennese artists and intellectuals at the time, something way better documented. This renders the earlier stuff about a possible sexual deprivation utterly meaningless and superfluous for anyone with a philosophical conscience. But hey, that's all just historical context being described...