Otto Weininger

Otto Weininger (born April 3, 1880, Vienna—died Oct. 4, 1903, Vienna) was an Austrian philosopher whose single work, Geschlecht und Charakter (1903; Sex and Character), served as a sourcebook for anti-Semitic propagandists.

The son of a prosperous Jewish artisan, Weininger became a Christian the day he received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Vienna (1902). The following year he published his partly scientific, partly philosophical study in which he advanced the thesis that all living things combined varying proportions of masculine and feminine elements. The masculine element was positive, productive, and moral, while the feminine was negative, unproductive, and amoral. In the chapter “Über das Judentum,” he denounced Judaism as feminine and amoral in contrast to Christianity. Weininger shot himself at the age of 23, shortly after the publication of Geschlecht und Charakter.