But there is something wrong here. Do we really take the opinions of children—even and perhaps especially grown children—as authoritative on questions of this kind? How many hem and haw when asked about whether they are “happy” even in their own relationships? Let alone those of others, even those we think we ought to know quite well. Beyond someone in patent distress or elation, it is a desperate question whether someone else is happy or not. I think we should assume, unless we have incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, that someone else is only as happy or unhappy as we are, that is to say, “they are hanging in there.” (I am not addressing the very common “aspirational happiness” or what we might say to someone we don’t know or don’t want to get into a long conversation with.)

I think we are on firmer ground to trust people to tell us about whether they felt themselves loved by their parents than we are to trust their judgment on the tangle of emotions that comprise an intimate relationship that they themselves were never party to. No doubt there must have been severe strain between Adelheid and Leopold, given the latter’s, perhaps eccentric, principledness. But if there was no love in the face of unhappiness we should have expected far worse consequences for all the children of this union.

There are three relationships involved: the one between his parents, and the one between Otto and his mother, Adelheid, and the one with his father, Leopold.

Commentators all seem to agree that Otto “worshipped” his father. But I find no where in his own writings where Otto says anything to suggest that he had any but a healthy honor and respect for his father, for his moral steadfastness especially in a Vienna at the time famous for everything but. There is nothing exactly excessive about his regard. Otto could very well deeply admire something about his father while entertaining reservations about him. His brother, Richard, writes in his memoir that Leopold was quite upset by what Otto said about Jews, though Leopold, a secular Jew, was hardly a philosemite. Otto was not afraid to cross his father. If an argument took him where not even his own father would be spared, he was prepared to go there.

As for his mother, we know precious little of how she felt about all this. But none of her children, the ones we have some record of, Rosa, Otto, and Richard, had anything negative to say about her. We are led to believe she was devoted and selfless, despite her ill health. I think there is room for speculation that Otto thought she was a bit too selfless. It is scarcely unusual for a son, still in the shadow of a strong father figure, to be reticent about directly expressing his feelings about his mother.

Moreover, there are passages in Sex and Character and in On Last Things where he says things that are not quite consistent with one who did not prize his mother’s love. He writes, for example, that “love-children” even those born out of wedlock are more likely to be healthier and to thrive than those who enter the world almost as a formality in established unions. The strength of a woman’s devotion to her chosen object of desire, and then to its issue, can override inauspicious circumstances. Indeed, it may be her chief or only resource against them.

But it is not my purpose to put forth any but a plausible domestic setting for the thesis that Weininger himself announces in the preface to Sex and Character, “…that the investigation finally turns against Man, placing the largest, and indeed the real, share of the blame on him in a deeper sense than the feminist can imagine” (Löb trans, p. 4)—even as he despairs that women will ever grasp this. I simply find Weininger’s family situation anything but a hotbed of hatred for anyone. The real support for this lies in a philosophical analysis of Weininger ideas both internally and in their relation to moral theory before and since. For this I refer you to Luno’s writings…