Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna (review)

Otto Weininger's brief life has often been regarded as singular and eccentrically tragic. Chandak Sengoopta provides a corrective with a lucid exposition of Weininger's ideas in his voluminous work on sex and character. He has the commendable aim of assimilating Weininger (1880-1903) into mainstream biology. Rather than dismissing his classic text as a tissue of racist and misogynist prejudices, the work of an unstable and self-hating Jewish apostate, Sengoopta rightly sees the necessity of explaining its dependence on other texts, intellectual traditions, and a whole multiplicity of discourses. At the outset the reader is treated to an illuminating analysis of the philosophical inputs of Kant and the physicist and philosopher Mach on the self. The author is at his best in providing textual exposition. But the historical contextualization is problematic. Here, a methodological issue arises: Weininger is juxtaposed against a general context, but the specificities of his experiences rarely interest Sengoopta.

As regards Weininger's education, his schools, the character of the district in Vienna, the teachers, and the numbers of Jewish pupils could have been identified. Similarly, no attempt is made to establish who studied at university in the same year as Weininger, and to provide a collective biographical profile of his student cohort. Instead, we are directed to secondary sources that do not relate specifically to Weininger. Without attention to the interaction of text, author, and context, the overall quality of the exposition becomes a matter of speculation. Even when we are told about an extant draft of Weininger's dissertation, no attempt is made to exploit this source to analyze his intellectual development. Similarly, the examiners' reports would have been of relevance in seeing the evolution of his central text.

Nor do we fare much better when we come to biology and the medical sciences. We are treated to a general overview of the history of the biological basis of sexuality, and Weininger's views on the evolution of sexual characteristics are carefully outlined. This leads to an interesting exposition on endocrinology and glandular processes as related to sexuality, as well as on hysteria and the defining of the female. It is no coincidence that Victor Medvei, the historian of endocrinology, had Viennese origins. But the role of specific influences on Weininger is inadequately analyzed. To take one example: we are told that Oscar Hertwig was an influence, yet Sengoopta does not probe the sociocultural constituents of Hertwig's biology, nor appreciate that Hertwig responded to Weininger and to other Viennese authors like Goldscheider and Popper-Lynkeus. Here, he would have been helped by available secondary literature on Hertwig, dealing with the germane issues of Lamarckism, organicist biology, and the debate on the chromosomal basis of inheritance. Sengoopta misconstrues Hertwig's views on the biology of male and female equality as biased toward male superiority (in fact, his cytology was scrupulous in maintaining male and female equality), and on hermaphroditism.

There is nothing here about the distinctive Austrian response to Darwinism, embryology, cytology, and reproductive physiology that led to the Vienna Vivarium. The author falls well short in his understanding of the complex constituents of German feminist organizations, and he overlooks the Medical Society for Sexual Science and Eugenetics where Austrian and German medical experts thrashed out ideas on evolution, sex, and medicine. Yet Austrian Social Darwinism contributed much to the shaping of psychosexual discourse. Weininger stood on the threshold of what crystallized into the Austrian eugenics movement with its various biological inputs and stress on the inherited constitution.

What we have here is a lucid and perceptive reading of Weininger, rather than a fully researched analysis of the formation and reception of his ideas. While this is a well-written and stimulating book, it is...