{"id":95,"date":"2006-03-03T14:21:45","date_gmt":"2006-03-03T22:21:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/phlogma.com\/?p=95"},"modified":"2009-06-26T15:17:24","modified_gmt":"2009-06-26T23:17:24","slug":"rough-sex-self-hate-and-truth-tables","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/weininger\/rough-sex-self-hate-and-truth-tables-95","title":{"rendered":"\u201cRough sex,\u201d\u009d self-hate, and truth tables"},"content":{"rendered":"

Notes on:
\nArthur Evans, “The Logic of Homophobia”<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Evans presents a common and severe view of Weininger, and blithely extends it to Wittgenstein—certainly, a kindred spirit. He seems inclined to take Weininger\u2019s misogyny at face value and links it to a certain excessive philologian tendency, finding both equally irredeemable. Though Evans charges Weininger, somewhat unimaginatively, with all the usual failings, he does intriguingly (to us) suggest that Wittgenstein\u2019s truth tables\t\u2014everywhere taught today in formal logic courses\t\u2014were inspired by Weininger\u2019s bivalent gender calculus.<\/p>\n

We’ll shortly see how Weininger’s gender-tables inspired Ludwig Wittgenstein’s truth-tables, a keystone of modern formal logic. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Later he writes,<\/p>\n

Wittgenstein and Weininger had much in common. Both were born and raised in Vienna. Both were closeted, self-hating homosexuals who were into rough sex. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cRough sex\u201d\u009d? This is new to me. Evans must be referring to Bartley\u2019s revelations regarding Wittgenstein, but Weininger and rough sex?? There is nothing about this in Abrahamsen<\/a>. Quite the opposite. The only reference to Weininger\u2019s actual sex life was a dubious claim by his father\t\u2014after Otto\u2019s suicide\t\u2014to the effect that his son was not unacquainted with women, though only a few. A strange comment: Leopold Weininger seemed caught between wanting to guard his son\u2019s normality\t\u2014present him as normal and healthy in his appetites, i.e., not gay\t\u2014while at the same time not too much as a skirt-chaser in that \u201chot bed\u201d\u009d of such activity at that time, Vienna. The comment was very probably a defensive attempt to disarm rumors that his son was homosexual\t\u2014notwithstanding his sister Rosa\u2019s account of her failed attempt to set up Otto with her girlfriend, a certain Miss Meyer. Miss Meyer, Rosa recounts, came out of an hour\u2019s private audience with Otto accusing him of being \u201cJesus Christ.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

It is true that celibacy can be pretty rough but I don\u2019t think this is what Evans meant.<\/p>\n

Weininger was Jewish and anti-Semitic. Three of Wittgenstein’s grandparents were Jewish. Like Weininger, Wittgenstein expressed anti-Semitic views, some as rabid as those of Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As did Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, Simone Weil, Stanley Kubrick, Noam Chomsky and host of other important Jewish cultural figures of the last century. Well, whether they were as rabid<\/em> as Hitler is open to debate… But we have to ask, can a Jew be self-critical without being that worst of Jews, according to Elie Wiesel<\/a>, a \u201czar\u201d\u009d?<\/em> Apparently not. The Holocaust quite thoroughly ruined this otherwise holy stance for many Jews perhaps for centuries to come. More generally, the exclusion of prejudice against oneself as a positive moral strategy is the longest lasting curse for any victimized group. It is essential to the long term scheme of any oppressor: rob your victim of this moral luxury forever, if possible. As a member of such a group, Evans seems himself afflicted by it. But he is scarcely alone…<\/p>\n

By coincidence, Wittgenstein and Hitler were born just six days apart, in April 1889. For a time, both were in the same grade in the same Austrian high school. <\/p>\n

Wittgenstein’s gay life did not become widely known until after his death. His executors, led by Elizabeth Anscombe, a devout Catholic, did everything in their power to throw biographers off the trail. When biographer William Bartley first disclosed in his 1973 book Wittgenstein<\/em> that the great philosopher had been gay, the executors, led by Anscombe, trashed him and tried to stop publication of his book.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

True, and (though we have some admiration for Anscombe on other grounds) shame on them, but Bartley\u2019s book reveals a depth about the man that leaves us with only greater admiration than before.<\/p>\n

The Ghost of Otto Weininger <\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1922, thanks to efforts by Russell, Wittgenstein managed to get a dense little book on formal logic published, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus<\/em> (Logical-Philosophical Treatise). Russell (along with most readers then and since) understood very little of the book. Nonetheless, he praised it highly. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If true, one has to wonder about Russell that he would praise something he understood so little.<\/p>\n

Alas, most of the book’s readers, beginning with Russell, misconstrued the thrust of Tractatus. The many passages that seemed incomprehensible (and, therefore, profound) were actually modeled after Otto Weininger’s mystical philosophy of logic in Sex and Character<\/em>. Nothing could be farther from the views of Bertrand Russell and the Vienna Circle! <\/p>\n

Wittgenstein often remarked that Weininger had influenced his thought. However, almost no one who read Wittgenstein bothered to read Weininger. Four factors contributed to this neglect: Weininger was a homosexual; he was anti-Semitic; his thought was saturated with mysticism; and he influenced the Nazis. Unknown to the fans of Tractatus<\/em>, the first three factors also characterized the young Ludwig Wittgenstein. <\/p>\n

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus<\/em> and Weininger’s Sex and Character<\/em> share a common motif: ascent by the socially-isolated male ego up the ladder of formal logic to a mystical vision of silent Truth. In Sex and Character<\/em>, Weininger calls the loner who reaches this peak “Kant’s solitary man” (alluding, inappropriately, to Immanuel Kant): <\/p>\n

Kant\u2019s solitary man laughs not, nor dances, shouts not, nor rejoices. For him, no need to make a noise, so deeply does the world-expanse its silence keep.<\/em> <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From Sex & Character<\/em>, the Heinemann edition (1906): \u201cKant\u2019s lonely man does not dance or laugh; he neither brawls nor makes merry; he feels no need to make a noise, because the universe is so silent around him. To acquiesce in his loneliness is the splendid supremacy of the Kantian.\u201d\u009d (Part II, Chap 7, par. 424<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

And in L\u00f6b\u2019s<\/a> more precise translation (2005): \u201cKant\u2019s loneliest human being does not laugh and does not dance, he does not roar and he does not cheer: he has no need to make a noise as if the silence of the universe were too deep for him.\u201d\u009d And we quote a little more, \u201cHe does not derive his duty from the meaningless of an \u2018accidental\u2019 world, but his duty, to him, is the meaning of the universe<\/em>. To say yes<\/em> to this<\/em><\/strong> loneliness is the \u2018Dionysian\u2019 element in Kant; that, and nothing less, is morality.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

Weininger was not big on humor. Even Kant could write parodies such as Dreams of a Spirit-Seer<\/em> (1766) which describes Swedenborg as rocked by \u201chypochondrial winds,\u201d\u009d a veritable \u201cfarting mystic\u201d\u009d (Sch\u00c3\u00b6nfeld<\/a>). (Speaking of selbsthass<\/em>, it wasn\u2019t just Swedenborg he was laughing at, Kant saw himself<\/em> in Swedenborg.) Weininger took his being here quite seriously. Perhaps, too much so. The Nazis, too, were not very funny.damn it if such people shouldn\u2019t all go the hell!<\/p>\n

Although Frege and Russell influenced Wittgenstein, he derived his truth-tables from Weininger’s gender-tables in Sex and Character<\/em>. As noted above, Weininger’s book contains tables and formulas using the two symbols M and W (for Mensch and Weib, that is, “man” and “woman”). By looking at a person’s M-W table, you can read off his or her overall character\t\u2014an idea based on the pseudo-science of physiognomy. Wittgenstein created tables using the two symbols W and F (for Wahr and Falsch, that is, “true” or “false”). He said they represented the “polarity” of language, just as Weininger had spoken of the “polarity” of sex. In his private notes, Wittgenstein said his tables displayed the physiognomy of language, just as Weininger believed his tables displayed the physiognomy of the body. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Evans may be on to something. (I can just see most Wittgenstein specialists sneering at the thought, but here I must side with Evans.*<\/a>) There are too many deep connections here on its face and in the offing to pass over. I am speaking as one who has for many years tutored college students in symbolic logic. I have always suspected there was some weightier significance lurking in all those matrices of T\u2019s and F\u2019s but I couldn\u2019t really explain it to my students. Something in the function of truth tables seemed uncannily evocative. The tables were symbolic themselves\t\u2014more than mere utensils for straining out valid arguments. Marian Walker, Gertrude Stein\u2019s feminist correspondent, was on the right track when she remarked how much fun it was to do the Weiningerian calculus on one\u2019s friends and acquaintances\t\u2014figuring out where the Law of Sexual Attraction placed each in relation to others. People have sex tables, just as complex propositions have ones that serve up truth and point up validity<\/em>. Recall Weininger said logic and ethics are one and the same, indeed this theme saturates Sex and Character<\/em>. (Which, of course, Wittgenstein generalized slightly to \u201caesthetics and ethics are one,\u201d\u009d Tractatus<\/em>, 6.421.)<\/p>\n

Weininger writes,<\/p>\n

[Par 502]<\/a> Shortly speaking the matter stands as follows: I have shown that logical and ethical phenomena come together in the conception of truth as the ultimate good, and posit the existence of an intelligible ego or a soul, as a form of being of the highest super-empirical reality. In such a being as the absolute female there are no logical and ethical phenomena, and, therefore, the ground for the assumption of a soul is absent. The absolute female knows neither the logical nor the moral imperative, and the words law and duty, duty towards herself, are words which are least familiar to her. The inference that she is wanting in super-sensual personality is fully justified. The absolute female has no ego. <\/p>\n

[Par 503]<\/a> In a certain sense this is an end of the investigation, a final conclusion to which all analysis of the female leads. And although this conclusion, put thus concisely, seems {p. 187} harsh and intolerant, paradoxical and too abrupt in its novelty, it must be remembered that the author is not the first who has taken such a view; he is more in the position of one who has discovered the philosophical grounds for an opinion of long standing. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Keep one thing very clearly in your mind as you read passages like this in Weininger\u2019s book. The moral\/logical realm Weininger alludes to is exclusively<\/em> the masculine one. It is the one where assignations of clear law-of-excluded-middle-style values rule. Though perhaps well-formed in other ways, women are most definitely not wffs<\/em> (well formed formulas) as men, the moral and rational ones, aspire to be. (Yes, the distillation of being into formula<\/em> or rule-governed entity is not as far-fetched as you might think: think men<\/em> now.) Readers almost invariably assume he is assigning truth\/moral values, negative ones, to the feminine vis-\u00c3\u00a0-vis the masculine. No, he is not. The feminine is outside all such judgment. Women are amoral and alogical<\/em>, as Weininger repeatedly takes pains to point out. The prefix \u201ca-\u201d\u009d in English means \u201cwithout\u201d\u009d or even \u201cbeyond,\u201d\u009d not \u201copposed to\u201d\u009d as does \u201canti-\u201d\u009d or \u201cim-\u201d\u009d. Isn\u2019t it a bad thing to be excluded from moral judgment? From the exclusive club of rational beings? Isn\u2019t it to be denied participation in a highly esteemed game?<\/p>\n

It depends on whose<\/em> game it is and the role<\/em> of that game in the lives of those who are compelled<\/em> to play it. Men require<\/em> morality of the sort Weininger is constantly describing. Women, fortunately, have other resources that govern human interaction for them. (I wasn\u2019t just joking when I said \u201cwell-formed\u201d\u009d: I meant morally<\/em>, too\t\u2014whatever else you might have been thinking.) The man\u2019s game, she<\/em> may take or leave. He<\/em> is not so privileged.<\/p>\n

Wittgenstein\u2019s tables had a mystical aspect. That’s because of something else he borrowed from Weininger, the notion that the truths of logic are empty tautologies. They don’t say<\/em> anything about the world. Instead, they show unspeakable logical forms that point to higher visions. All this is vintage Weininger. Yet many still regard Wittgenstein’s notion of the emptiness of logical truths as an original contribution to modern formal logic. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This \u201cemptiness\u201d\u009d is an intimation of the limits of logic and perforce of ethics. It is the beginning of the realization that only half of the world is being delimited. Wittgenstein followed Weininger out to the perimeter of what was deducible on a certain set of assumptions. Only where Weininger attempted to cross the perimeter, Wittgenstein balked and made enigmatic gestures about Weininger\u2019s mistake. Wittgenstein survived. [Editor’s note<\/em>: Whatever the reader may think about “survival”, Luno is being coy here. “Survival” is not, in itself, for him a moral virtue.]<\/p>\n

This kind of strategy\t\u2014overcoming erotic impulses by redirecting them into allegedly higher paths\t\u2014is an old chestnut for emotionally isolated closet-homosexuals with spiritual aspirations. Not surprisingly, those who take this tortured path are often drawn to authoritarian ideologies, while yet engaging in secretive, guilt-ridden sexual encounters on the sly. (The Catholic priesthood continues to be a magnet for such conflicted men.) In Wittgenstein’s case, maturing as he did in pre-war Vienna, the particular authoritarian ideology to which he turned was that of the protofascist Otto Weininger. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For a little political corrective here, we might consult Kimberly Cornish\u2019s The Jew of Linz<\/em>. Cornish tells an amazing story surrounding a titanic lifelong intellectual struggle between Wittgenstein and Hitler stemming from a boyhood squabble at the school in Linz they both attended contemporaneously. The story is not supposed<\/em> to be a fiction based on tantalizing fact. But whatever its ultimate truth value (speaking of truth tables), it is at least as believable as Evans\u2019 charged dismissal of Weininger and Wittgenstein on the grounds of their fascistic tendencies.<\/p>\n

While we are at it\t\u2014viz<\/em>, in a fascist hunting mode\t\u2014are we supposed to conclude that even Stalin was an idol of fascists? (I won\u2019t do anything here but mention in passing Wittgenstein\u2019s well known sympathies with at least the idea<\/em> of Stalin\u2019s Soviet Union.) There was a time when Stalin had a sycophantic confidant in star New York Times<\/em> reporter Walter Duranty. Stalin\u2019s chief American apologist was an approving Weininger reader, too (see this post<\/a>). Up until at least the end of World War II and the first Stalinist revelations, Duranty was a darling of the left. Then, a result of his denial of the premeditated starvation of at least 7 million in the Ukraine at Stalin\u2019s orders, his star began to lose its sheen.<\/p>\n

The point here is not that reading Weininger was somehow also a pastime of some leftists no less than \u201cprotofascists\u201d\u009d. Was Duranty a fascist because a fan of Weininger or a Stalinist because he all but lied to millions of readers in defending Stalin? Can one do both?… Duranty was petty, venal and scarcely a person of any kind of principle, left or right. We only adduce him here to hint at the breadth and depth of Weininger\u2019s influence across the political spectrum.<\/p>\n

Hans Kelsen, philosopher of law, considered by many, the \u201clegal expert of the century\u201d\u009d and a chief architect of the Nuremberg trials knew and befriended and was inspired by Weininger when they were students together at University of Vienna… The point is that ultimately Weininger\u2019s significance was quintessentially apolitical<\/em>. Or was sufficiently diffuse to neutralize any political effect.<\/p>\n

Hitler\u2019s lawyer did suggest Weininger\u2019s book was bedside reading for the Fuhrer (see Hamann<\/a>), but the Nazis banned Otto\u2019s book anyway. They wanted the Aryan woman to shell out thoroughbred babies in short order and in healthy quantities to keep the Master Race well stocked, and Weininger\u2019s talk of abstention would not do.<\/p>\n

There are those, perhaps Evans among them, who would deny that it is possible to be apolitical, that anything that remotely smacks of the transcendental is a distraction from a material morality and is a fascism in the making (\u201cif you are not with us you are against us,\u201d\u009d to quote the motto of a well-known president), as though only abstract principles could be harnessed for the universal task of oppression. I think we do the human imagination for depravity an injustice to limit it so. Yes, Hitler and Mussolini did read and admire sundry passages in Sex and Character<\/em>. But other passages (such as this one<\/a>), we have to conclude, must have been missing from their copies. I\u2019m sure Stalin even read Marx and dog-eared a few amenable pages. But I, for one, am still able to make out a distinction between Marx\u2019s teaching and Stalin\u2019s implementation. To be sure, we have to blame philosophers themselves for sometimes spreading rumors of their overweening influence on the course of history. If they want credit for the good, they should get it for the bad. But history will trash and rave at a whim without scruple. If philosophers think otherwise, I fear they are clowns.<\/p>\n

When Weininger’s importance to Wittgenstein is taken into account, Tractatus<\/em> comes clearly into view on the stage of history for what it really was\t\u2014the spiritual self-portrait of a tormented, protofascist mind. The book was also an important contribution to the development of modern formal logic. And there’s the rub that brings us to a greater question\t\u2014the nature of philosophy and formal logic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Logic of Homophobia<\/strong><\/p>\n

Weininger and the early Wittgenstein both combined two character traits. One was enthusiasm for philosophy, and especially for formal logic. The other was a flight from the body, sex, the feminine, and the world. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

True, and it would behoove us to understand how the traits are related, not merely decry them.<\/p>\n

And that’s exactly what we found in Weininger and the young Wittgenstein, the logic of homophobia taken to its most exalted metaphysical heights. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Patriarchal Reason<\/strong><\/p>\n

Western logic\u2019s long alienation from the world and from the feminine has created a skewed ideal of thinking, what I call patriarchal reason. This skewed ideal rests on a number of myths. One is the myth of bivalence\t\u2014the claim that a proposition must be either true or false, and nothing in-between. This is like saying a human being must be either masculine or feminine, and nothing in-between.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A curious statement in light of the fact that Weininger was celebrated by early gay sexologists such as Edward Carpenter and even treated with a certain amount of respect by feminist activists such as Dora Marsden precisely for his insight that actual men and women are never found as pure types<\/em>. Gender intermediacy is general, Weininger was at pains to argue. Everyone is \u201cin-between\u201d\u009d<\/em>. [See Iaia Gombrowicz’s discussion of Judy Greenway\u2019s \u201cIt\u2019s What You Do With It That Counts: Interpretations of Otto Weininger.\u201d\u009d<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Whether expressed in gender-tables or truth-tables, the myth of bivalence has impeded our quest to understand the world. It\u2019s time to throw it out. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And replace it with what? The myth of equality<\/em>?… In my notes on Sylviane Agacinski<\/a>, Sartre and elsewhere, I address the mixed legacy of that notion. Here I just want to add that the dynamic that leads to homophobia is different from that which leads to sexism, or racism, or anti-Semitism, or speciesism, etc. While it is understandable that \u201cbrothers and sisters in oppression\u201d\u009d should want to link arms, we had better get more sophisticated in our discriminations, i.e., \u201csee differences,\u201d\u009d or we will be at this for so long that we may become inured to the condition.<\/p>\n

Note<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

*<\/strong><\/a> Independently of Wittgenstein (who completed the Tractatus<\/em> in 1918, not published until 1921), the truth table method, fundamental to proof theory, was also deployed by Emil Post (1897-1954) in 1921. Indeed, several other mathematicians seemed to have also honed in on the idea long before. Quine writes in Methods of Logic<\/em>, \u201cThe pattern of reasoning that the truth table tabulates was Frege\u2019s, Peirce\u2019s, and Schr\u00c3\u00b6der\u2019s by 1880. The tables have been prominent in literature since 1920 (Lukasiewicz, Post, Wittgenstein).\u201d\u009d (See also this discussion<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

But it was Wittgenstein\u2019s presentation of the logic that seemed to cut the widest and deepest swath. I would attribute this to his moral intensity and this, I suspect, takes flight in large part from the Weiningerian inkling that the two, logic and ethics, are fundamentally related (as Russell learned to his chagrin). The claim is a claim about logic and ethics but itself neither a logical nor an ethical one. It is a claim about the structure of the world. One half of the structure of the world, as it turns out. Only half<\/em> true, perhaps, but most philosophers do worse.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Notes on: Arthur Evans, “The Logic of Homophobia” Evans presents a common and severe view of Weininger, and blithely extends it to Wittgenstein—certainly, a kindred spirit. He seems inclined to take Weininger\u2019s misogyny at face value and links it to a certain excessive philologian tendency, finding both equally irredeemable. Though Evans charges Weininger, somewhat unimaginatively, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “\u201cRough sex,\u201d\u009d self-hate, and truth tables”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,44,14,19,38,40,2,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-heterocosmos","category-logic","category-moral-consciousness","category-philosophical-hatred","category-philosophy-and-sex","category-orientation","category-weininger","category-wittgenstein"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}