Otto Weininger citáty

„Člověk je tím významnější, čím víc pro něj věci znamenají.“

—  Otto Weininger

„Most of the time man does not do what he wills, but what he has willed. Through his decisions, he always gives himself only a certain direction, in which he then moves until the next moment of reflection. We do not will continuously, we only will intermittently“

—  Otto Weininger

Collected Aphorisms
Kontext: Most of the time man does not do what he wills, but what he has willed. Through his decisions, he always gives himself only a certain direction, in which he then moves until the next moment of reflection. We do not will continuously, we only will intermittently, piece by piece. We thus save ourselves from willing: principle of the economy of the will. But the higher man always experiences this as thoroughly immoral.

„Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. … The theory of special genius, according to which for instance, it is supposed that a musical genius should be a fool at other subjects, confuses genius with talent. … There are many kinds of talent, but only one kind of genius, and that is able to choose any kind of talent and master it.“

—  Otto Weininger, kniha Sex and Character

Zdroj: Sex and Character (1903), p. 112.

„That which enables man to have a real relation to truth and which removes his temptation to lie, must be something independent of all time, something absolutely unchangeable, which as faithfully reproduces the old as if it were new, because it is permanent itself; it can only be that source in which all discrete experiences unite and which creates from the first a continuous existence. It is what produces the feeling of responsibility which oppresses all men, young and old, as to their actions, which makes them know that they are responsible, which leads to the phenomena of repentance and consciousness of sin, which calls to account before an eternal and ever present self things that are long past, its judgment being subtler and more comprehensive than that of any court of law or of the laws of society, and which is exerted by the individual himself quite independently of all social codes“

—  Otto Weininger, kniha Sex and Character

so condemning the moral psychology which would derive morality from the social life of man
Zdroj: Sex and Character (1903), p. 151.

„In order to depict a man one must understand him, and to understand him one must be like him; in order to portray his psychological activities one must be able to reproduce them in oneself. To understand a man one must have his nature in oneself.“

—  Otto Weininger, kniha Sex and Character

Zdroj: Sex and Character (1903), p. 105.

„The deepest, the intelligible, part of the nature of man is that part which does not take refuge in causality, but which chooses in freedom the good or the bad.“

—  Otto Weininger, kniha Sex and Character

Zdroj: Sex and Character (1903), p. 158.

„As the mental endowment of a man varies with the organisation of his accumulated experiences, the better endowed he is, the more readily will he be able to remember his whole past, everything that he has ever thought or heard, seen or done, perceived or felt, the more completely in fact will he be able to reproduce his whole life. Universal remembrance of all its experiences, therefore, is the surest, most general, and most easily proved mark of a genius.“

—  Otto Weininger, kniha Sex and Character

Zdroj: Sex and Character (1903), pp. 114-115.

„The logical axioms are the principle of all truth. These posit an existence towards which all cognition serves. Logic is a law which must be obeyed, and man realises himself only in so far as he is logical. He finds himself in cognition. All error must be felt to be crime. And so man must not err. He must find the truth.“

—  Otto Weininger, kniha Sex and Character

Zdroj: Sex and Character (1903), p. 158.

„The psychical condition of men’s minds may be compared with a set of bells close together, and so arranged that in the ordinary man a bell rings only when one beside it sounds, and the vibration lasts only a moment. In the genius, when a bell sounds it vibrates so strongly that it sets in action the whole series, and remains in action throughout life. The latter kind of movement often gives rise to extraordinary conditions and absurd impulses, that may last for weeks together and that form the basis of the supposed kinship of genius with insanity.“

—  Otto Weininger, kniha Sex and Character

Zdroj: Sex and Character (1903), pp. 122-123.

„A creature that cannot grasp the mutual exclusiveness of A and not A has no difficulty in lying; more than that, such a creature has not even any consciousness of lying, being without a standard of truth.“

—  Otto Weininger, kniha Sex and Character

Zdroj: Sex and Character (1903), p. 150.

„The great man of science, unless he is also a philosopher, … deserves the title of genius as little as the man of action.“

—  Otto Weininger, kniha Sex and Character

Zdroj: Sex and Character (1903), pp. 139-140.

„Zola, who has so faithfully described the impulse to commit murder, did not himself commit a murder, because there were so many other characters in him. The actual murderer is in the grasp of his own disposition: the author describing the murder is swayed by a whole kingdom of impulses. Zola would know the desire for murder much better than the actual murderer would know it, he would recognise it in himself, if it really came to the surface in him, and he would be prepared for it. In such ways the criminal instincts in great men are intellectualised and turned to artistic purposes as in the case of Zola, or to philosophic purposes as with Kant, but not to actual crime.“

—  Otto Weininger, kniha Sex and Character

Zdroj: Sex and Character (1903), p. 109.

„In men of genius, sterile years precede productive years, these again to be followed by sterility, the barren periods being marked by psychological self-depreciation, by the feeling that they are less than other men; times in which the remembrance of the creative periods is a torment, and when they envy those who go about undisturbed by such penalties. Just as his moments of ecstasy are more poignant, so are the periods of depression of a man of genius more intense than those of other men.“

—  Otto Weininger, kniha Sex and Character

Denn gerade die starke Periodizität des Genies bringt es mit sich, daß bei ihm immer erst auf sterile Jahre die fruchtbaren und auf sehr produktive Zeiten immer wieder sehr unfruchtbare folgen—Zeiten, in denen er von sich nichts hält, ja von sich psychologisch (nicht logisch) weniger hält als von jedem anderen Menschen: quält ihn doch die Erinnerung an die Schaffensperiode, und vor allem—wie frei sieht er sie, die von solchen Erinnerungen nicht Belästigten, herumgehen! Wie seine Ekstasen gewaltiger sind als die der anderen, so sind auch seine Depressionen fürchterlicher.
Zdroj: Sex and Character (1903), p. 107.

„With ordinary men the moments which are united in a close continuity out of the original discrete multiplicity are very few, and the course of their lives resembles a little brook, whereas with the genius it is more like a mighty river into which all the little rivulets flow from afar; that is to say, the universal comprehension of genius vibrates to no experience in which all the individual moments have not been gathered up and stored.“

—  Otto Weininger, kniha Sex and Character

Zdroj: Sex and Character (1903), p. 124.

„Man is alone in the world, in tremendous eternal isolation. He has no object outside himself; lives for nothing else; he is far removed from being the slave of his wishes, of his abilities, of his necessities; he stands far above social ethics; he is alone. Thus he becomes one and all.“

—  Otto Weininger, kniha Sex and Character

[Paraphrasing Kant] p. 162.
Sex and Character (1903)

„Not only virtue, but also insight, not only sanctity but also wisdom, are the duties and tasks of mankind.“

—  Otto Weininger, kniha Sex and Character

Zdroj: Sex and Character (1903), p. 159.

„Memory, then, is a necessary part of the logical faculty. … The proposition A = A must have a psychological relation to time, otherwise it would be At1 = At2.“

—  Otto Weininger, kniha Sex and Character

Zdroj: Sex and Character (1903), p. 148.

„There is, moreover, very little sense in preventing young people from giving expression to their ideas on the pretext that they have less experience than have older persons. There are many who may live a thousand years without encountering experience of any value. It could only be in a society of persons equally gifted that such an idea could have any meaning.“

—  Otto Weininger, kniha Sex and Character

Zdroj: Sex and Character (1903), p. 121.

„Psychologism is the most comfortable conception of life, because according to it there are no longer any more problems. That is why it also condemns all solutions from the outset, since it acknowledges the actual problems as little as the idea of truth.“

—  Otto Weininger

Collected Aphorisms