Otto Weininger, Sputnik and the ten days the calendar lost: 4 October
On 4 October 1903 Otto Weininger shot himself in Vienna at twenty-three, months after publishing Sex and Character, a book of real brilliance and real poison. On the same date in 1957 Sputnik left the earth and gave Hannah Arendt the opening of The Human Condition; and in 1582 the calendar simply lost ten days.
A replica of Sputnik 1, National Air and Space Museum · NASA / NSSDC · Wikimedia Commons
Few dates are as full of departures and thresholds as 4 October. In 1903 a twenty-three-year-old Viennese named Otto Weininger shot himself in the house where Beethoven had died, four months after publishing a book that was brilliant, famous and poisonous in roughly equal measure. In 1957 the Soviet Union put a metal sphere into orbit and handed Hannah Arendt the first sentences of her greatest book. And in 1582 the day itself was cancelled: in Catholic Europe 4 October was followed directly by 15 October, and ten days were simply struck out. The philosophical world also buried one of its own this week, Ioanna Kuçuradi, born on 4 October 1936 and dead on 2 October 2026, two days short of her ninetieth birthday, the first woman to lead the International Federation of Philosophical Societies and a lifelong theorist of human dignity; a fuller tribute belongs elsewhere.
The thread is the one her work would have recognised: where the value of a human being comes from, and what happens to that value when the human is seen from outside — from a theory of ranked 'principles', from the far side of the earth, from the arbitrariness of the clock.
Otto Weininger: brilliance in the service of poison#
Weininger was born in Vienna on 3 April 1880, into a Jewish family, took his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1902 and was baptised a Protestant on the day he graduated. Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) appeared that June. On 4 October 1903 he rented a room at Schwarzspanierstrasse 15, the house in which Beethoven had died in 1827, and shot himself through the chest. He was twenty-three. The book then did what the author could not: it ran through edition after edition, was translated into a dozen languages, and became, for the first half of the century, one of the most widely read works of philosophy in Europe.
There is no responsible way to describe it except plainly. Weininger held that every person is a mixture of a 'masculine' and a 'feminine' principle, and that the feminine principle, as such, is without logic, without morality and without genius, fit only for sexuality and incapable of a self. He then mapped 'Jewishness' onto the same feminine pole, treating it as a dissolving, faithless tendency rather than a people, and ranked it below the Christianity he had just adopted. The misogyny is total and the antisemitism is of a peculiarly corrosive kind, aimed by a Jewish convert at a category he assigned himself to. It made Weininger the type specimen of what was later called the self-hating Jew, and Nazi propagandists quarried him for passages, the awkward detail that he despised the race theories they built on notwithstanding. None of this is incidental to the book. It is the book's argument, and it fails as argument, not merely as decency.
Samuel Clarke, Newton's advocate against Leibniz, was born on 11 October 1675; Hans Kelsen, author of the Pure Theory of Law, on 11 October 1881. Tschirnhaus died on the date in 1708, Zwingli in battle in 1531, and in 1939 Alexander Sachs carried Einstein's letter into the Oval Office. The thread is where reason's reach ends and responsibility begins.
Charles Taylor, Scott J. Shapiro, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Robert Alexy
Why, then, does he survive in a philosophy calendar at all? Because of his effect on the Vienna around him, and above all on Ludwig Wittgenstein, who named Weininger among the writers who had shaped him and defended the choice in a way that is itself a small lesson in reading. 'It is true that he is fantastic,' Wittgenstein wrote to G. E. Moore, 'but he is great and fantastic.' The greatness, he insisted, lay precisely in that with which one disagreed: 'It is his enormous mistake which is great.' The ethical chapters of Sex and Character take Kant's categorical imperative and Arthur Schopenhauer's ethics of the will and drive them towards a single, pitiless demand, a duty to realise the genius in oneself or forfeit the right to exist. Weininger's suicide was the horrible consistency of the doctrine rather than a refutation of it.
The book was an expanded doctoral thesis, and its ambition was nothing smaller than a general theory of genius, character and the moral law. That reach, and its tone of absolute ethical requirement, is what seized Vienna's attention and held Wittgenstein's for the rest of his life. He kept copies to give away, and the austere closing movement of the Tractatus — that ethics cannot be put into words, that it can only show itself in how a life is led — keeps faith with Weininger's conviction that the ethical is the one thing that finally matters and the one thing about which philosophy must fall silent. Honesty towards oneself, for both men, was less a virtue than the condition of being able to think at all.
To read him now is not to accept any of his conclusions but to be made to ask a question that will not go away. Can the philosophical force of a thinker be held apart from the moral and scientific worth of what he thought? Wittgenstein's answer, in his own idiom, was yes: from a philosopher one can learn the shape of a question even when every one of his answers is wrong. It is a generous principle, and Weininger is the hardest case on which to test it.
On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, an eighty-three-kilogram sphere with four trailing antennae that circled the earth and emitted a radio pulse for three weeks. The event was not a philosophy seminar, but a philosopher made it the hinge of a book. Hannah Arendt opened The Human Condition (1958) with it, calling the launch 'an event second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom'. What unsettled her was not the feat but the mood around it. The first reaction reported in the press, she noted, was relief: relief at a 'step toward escape from men's imprisonment to the earth'. Imprisonment. Human beings had greeted the first object sent beyond the planet as a jailbreak from the one place that makes them what they are. 'The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition,' she wrote, and the wish to be quit of it struck her as a wish to be quit of the human condition itself.
The prologue does more than register alarm. Arendt uses Sputnik to state the worry that organises the whole book, that human capability has outrun human understanding: we had learned to do things — launch a satellite, split the atom, and before long, she suspected, remake life in the laboratory — that we could no longer talk about in ordinary speech or weigh in ordinary judgement. The scientists, she observed, had come to move in a world of mathematical symbols they could not translate back into language, and a political community unable to discuss what it is doing has mislaid the faculty that makes it a community at all. Sputnik was the moment the gap turned visible to everyone.
Arendt traced this earth-alienation a long way back, to Galileo's telescope and the discovery that the senses could be overruled by an instrument. The twentieth century had merely built the engine to act on it. Nine years later Martin Heidegger, in his 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, said that the photographs of the earth taken from space had frightened him, that they showed an uprooting of humanity already complete. Set against that unease is the plainer thought the pictures also provoked, that a small blue planet seen from outside looks less like a prison than like the only home there is. The question Sputnik opened has not closed: now that spaceflight and machine intelligence advance together, does the human being, having looked at itself from orbit, have to think of itself differently?
The 4th of October 1582 was the last day of the Julian calendar in the Catholic world. The next morning was Friday 15 October. Pope Gregory XIII's bull Inter gravissimas had ordered the correction: the Julian year ran about eleven minutes long, the error had piled up to ten days over sixteen centuries, and the fix was to delete them at a stroke. The astronomer Christopher Clavius chose October for the cut because it carried the fewest feast days. Here is time showing its seams. If the date can be legislated, then the calendar is an institution and not a fact of nature, which is why the Protestant states held out against the Pope's arithmetic for a century and a half, Britain until 1752, Russia until 1918 and Greece until 1923. Teresa of Ávila happened to die on the night the change was made, so that her death fell into the ten-day hole; her feast is kept on 15 October because the days between the 4th and the 14th did not exist in the year she died. When Kant later called time the pure form of inner intuition rather than a thing in the world, he was writing for an age that had watched ten of its days abolished by decree.
Rembrandt van Rijn died in Amsterdam on 4 October 1669, insolvent since his bankruptcy of 1656 and buried in an unmarked grave in the Westerkerk. His standing in a calendar of ideas rests on the self-portraits, close to a hundred of them in paint and etching across a working life, the first sustained record in Western art of a self studying itself as it ages. They are contemporaries, in the same Dutch republic, of Descartes constructing the cogito, the self that is certain of itself by thinking; Rembrandt gives the same self a face, and the face keeps changing. Georg Simmel, in Rembrandt (1916), read the portraits as making the whole movement of a life visible in a single moment of looking, and the late, loosely brushed ones as a meditation on how fragile seeing itself is. This is material for the long argument about the modern self and the turn inward that runs back through Augustine. One of the last self-portraits shows an old man laughing, which is a sentence no philosopher has managed to write.
Péter Pázmány was born on 4 October 1570 at Nagyvárad, now Oradea in Romania. Raised a Calvinist, he turned Catholic at thirteen, entered the Society of Jesus, studied theology under Robert Bellarmine in Rome and lectured at the Jesuit university of Graz before becoming Archbishop of Esztergom in 1616 and a cardinal in 1629. He led the Counter-Reformation in Hungary, founded in 1635 the university at Nagyszombat that is the ancestor of today's Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, and is counted among the makers of Hungarian literary prose. His career is a reminder that in early modern Europe philosophy was not yet a secular discipline standing clear of theology and statecraft; logic, metaphysics and religion still shared one desk.
So the day offers several answers to one question. Weininger ranked human beings by abstract 'principles' and showed, in his own person, where that ends. Sputnik lifted the human out of its only setting and asked whether the thought we have of ourselves can survive the view. The calendar of 1582 proved that even time is something we agree to keep. Rembrandt did none of this and simply went on looking at one face until it yielded its depth, which may be the steadier method. Kuçuradi, whose birthday this was, spent a career insisting that the value of a human being is not a price or a rank but something to be seen rightly; buried this week, she leaves the question exactly where the day leaves it, open. The most recent entry in this series to reach the archive, on Unamuno, Cervantes and Mises, is here, and the month's gatherings are in the October conference diary.
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was born in Berlin on 10 October 1873. He made the history of ideas a discipline, traced one idea from Plato to the Romantics in The Great Chain of Being, and helped write the rules of academic freedom he later qualified. The same date, in four Catholic countries, did not exist in 1582.
Jacques Derrida died in Paris on 9 October 2004; Nicolai Hartmann died in Göttingen on 9 October 1950. One spent a career showing that presence never quite arrives, the other rebuilt an ontology of levels in which being does not depend on anyone's knowing it. The date puts the two reflexes of twentieth-century philosophy side by side.
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