On 4 October 1903, a 23-year-old man went to the house where Beethoven had died in Vienna and shot himself. Otto Weininger felt himself to be a great genius; he hoped in his final moments to absorb some of Beethoven’s lustre. It worked. The obscure book he left behind, Sex and Character, rapidly gained the recognition its author craved. Weininger’s theatrical suicide inspired copycats and attracted admirers. The Nazi grandee Dietrich Eckart, Hitler relayed to his dining companions in December 1941, said that Weininger was the only respectable Jew he’d ever encountered — because he took his own life “once he recognised that the Jew lives on the decay of other peoples”. (This didn’t count for much, in the end; Weininger’s writings were banned in the Third Reich anyway.)

Sex and Character found particular success among tortured, brooding young men like its author. Ludwig Wittgenstein read it as a schoolboy, and remained devoted to it for the rest of his life. In a letter to his protégée, Elizabeth Anscombe, he favoured Weininger above Kafka: Kafka gave himself a “great deal of trouble not writing about his trouble”, whereas Weininger had the courage to face it all head-on. Weininger provides Ray Monk’s masterly biography of Wittgenstein with its master-theme. What Wittgenstein took from Weininger was the “twist” to Kant’s moral law that Monk made the subtitle of his book: “The Duty of Genius.”

Most who read Sex and Character today find their way to it via Wittgenstein. In August 1931 Wittgenstein remarked to G.E. Moore that Weininger “must feel very foreign to you”, and he is bound to feel even more foreign to the 21st-century reader. His intricate intermingling of misogyny with antisemitism is as baffling as it is off-putting. Yet although he makes an apology, early on, that the book “is for the most part not of a quality to be understood and absorbed at first glance”, it is surprisingly readable. Sometimes it rings familiar. Weininger combined ideas which we now would find only in the more esoteric corners of the online Right with ideas which are nowadays espoused in gender studies departments. He’s Judith Butler meets Bronze Age Pervert.

The main target of Sex and Character is femininity. Weininger knew his book was liable to offend its few female readers; he notes at the beginning that nothing would “rehabilitate” him in their minds. He was not so distressed at the thought of their disapproval. “The male,” he writes, “lives consciously; the female lives unconsciously.” Women do not think thoughts but rather what he called “henids”: half-baked notions more akin to feelings. Women are gossipy, sensual, vacuous. Their one love in life, so we are told, is matchmaking.

Yet when Weininger speaks of men and women, he is not speaking of biological categories. He is, in fact, an early critic of biological essentialism and a proponent of gender fluidity. All people, he claimed, are a mixture of maleness and femaleness; all exist along a spectrum, in various “transitional forms”. Weininger presented his argument as a “complete revision of facts hitherto accepted”, and it is a revision which has kept a foothold ever since.

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