Editor’s Note: The brilliant Arthur Evans passed away last year, a polymath activist-intellectual whose published works spanned from 1978’s Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture to 1997’s Critique of Patriarchal Reason and beyond. The former was based on lectures he delivered on Page Street in San Francisco in 1974, which is in keeping with his Socrates-like persona as a public thinker who was a familiar figure around the stoa of Haight-Ashbury for over 35 years.
The latter book, based on materials produced over a nine-year period, was published shortly before this article appeared in the HGLR (Summer 2000). This piece can be seen as a special case of what Evans saw as the central tendency of Western philosophy since the Greeks, the elevation of formal logic to the stature of Truth and the identification of this method with the masculine, thereby establishing an “objective” basis for male dominance and homophobia. What’s more, this form of “patriarchal reason” was boosted in the 20th century by two closeted gay philosophers, Otto Weininger and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
IN 1969 I helped found a new group in New York City called the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). One of GAA’s favorite tactics was the “zap”—a form of militant but nonviolent confrontation with anti-gay oppressors that combined high camp, political savvy, and chutzpah. In those days there was almost no serious coverage of gay/lesbian issues in the mass media. The zap was designed to shred the media’s cloak of silence. It had been conceived for this purpose by the late Marty Robinson, a brilliant Stonewall-era tactician.
Hauppauge, Long Island, provides an example of how the zap worked. In 1971, the Long Island police had trashed a lesbian bar in the little town of Coram and beat up the women who went there. The cops also repeatedly harassed gay people who vacationed at nearby Fire Island. GAA called on George Aspland, the Long Island district attorney, to investigate the police for their continuing violation of our civil rights, but he refused. So we conducted a loud but peaceful takeover of Aspland’s office in the fall, intending to make a citizen’s arrest of him for malfeasance in office. Without warning, however, Aspland’s deputies surged into the office where we were waiting, swinging blackjacks and breaking noses and ribs.
Although some demonstrators were bloodied, and all were shoved out of Aspland’s office, our zap was nonetheless a success. It generated a sensational amount of publicity in Long Island about gay and lesbian issues. For the first time ever, the media there started taking our community seriously. Gay and lesbian life in Long Island would never be the same.
But even as GAA’s zaps were smashing through media barriers, we realized that we suffered from a linguistic deficiency. There was no simple term that we could use to capture the various forms of oppression that were crippling our lives. I remember one zap in particular when TV reporters wanted a sound-bite from us that would sum up the barriers gay people faced. GAA president Jim Owles, a level-headed and brave soul, struggled for the right words—it’s like racism, but it isn’t really racism, it holds down an entire group of people, but this group isn’t like any other group, etc. Too many words to make a quick punch on evening TV.
By good fortune, George Weinberg, a straight psychologist who had long been a friend of our community, regularly attended GAA meetings. Watching with fascination our zaps and the media responses, he came up with the word that we had been struggling for: “homophobia,” derived from Greek words meaning “the same” and “fear,” and meaning the irrational fear of loving someone of the same sex. George’s new word first appeared in book form in 1972 in his groundbreaking work Society and the Healthy Homosexual.
The invention of the word “homophobia” is an example of how theory can be rooted in practice. The word didn’t come from an armchair academician viewing the movement at a distance, like a biologist squinting through a microscope at a slide. Instead, it came from personal interactions among active, thinking people who acknowledged a shared value: the transformation of society for the better.
Sex, Character & Logic
Formal logic, as opposed to everyday logic, can be defined as the application of calculative methods to verbal arguments, with an eye to seeing which turn out to be true. Example: Let p and q stand for simple sentences. If so, then we can calculate that the following compound sentence is also true: “If p and q, then q and p.”
While few people are aware of it, the development of modern formal logic was affected by the philosophical speculations of a self-hating Jewish gay man who later influenced Nazi ideology. His importance for formal logic came through the impact he exercised on a philosopher much better known today than himself, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The mystery man is Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger, who was born in 1880 and committed suicide in 1903 at age 23. Shortly before his death, Weininger published a brilliant and twisted book on logic and sex entitled Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character). His youthful suicide, following publication of Sex and Character, turned Weininger into an instant literary sensation. For a while, he was more famous than his Viennese contemporary, Sigmund Freud.
To say the least, Weininger was a psychological mess. Although Jewish and gay, he was outspokenly anti-Semitic and homophobic. He was especially fascinated by sadomasochistic sex and murder. Sex and Character is one of the most striking examples of philosophical misogyny ever printed. Weininger glorified butch, iron-willed, rationally calculating, women-hating men.
In the decades following Weininger’s death, Sex and Character appealed to rising reactionary elements in Europe who resented Jews and who feared the nascent political movements lobbying for civil rights for women and gay people. With such a following, the book helped lay the ideological groundwork for the rise of Nazism. Adolf Hitler, approving a remark once made to him by Dietrich Eckart, commented that Weininger was the only “good Jew” he had ever heard of. The Nazis borrowed from Sex and Character in their propaganda. David Abrahamsen, a biographer of Weininger’s, recounts a personal experience: “It may be of interest to note that as late as 1939 I heard in Norway a radio broadcast beamed from Nazi Germany, which used some of Weininger’s attacks upon the Jews.”
Weininger’s mishmash of homophobia, misogyny, and anti-Semitism rested on a philosophy of formal logic. He believed that formal logic represented the culmination of what it meant to be human. He also believed that women and feminine-identified men were genetically incapable of mastering formal logic because of the role of emotion in their thinking. The same applied to Jews, whom Weininger regarded as an effeminate, emotion-driven race. A typical Weininger quote (my translation, pages 205 and 244 in Sex and Character):
Logic is a law which shall be heeded, and man is first entirely himself when he is entirely logical. Indeed, he is not until he is thoroughly and everywhere only logic. … The logical axioms constitute the principle of all conceptuality, and these are lacking in women. … This lack of conceptual determinateness in all feminine thinking is the basis of that “sensitivity” in women by which they give unlimited free play to vague associations and so frequently drag in far-fetched things in making comparisons.
Weininger believed that the connection between gender, character, and logic could be quantified and represented schematically. Take any human being, he claimed, and you could in theory depict the ratio of masculinity and femininity in his or her body with a formula or table. The same ratio will also display the degree to which the person’s character has approached the fullness of human perfection: that is, perfect masculinity.
The young Weininger was heavily influenced by the faddish interest of his day in physiognomy, the 19th-century pseudo-science that believed you could read a person’s character from his or her bodily features. Weininger wanted to quantify physiognomy, while stressing that sex was the most important part of bodily features. His book contains a number of curious tables and formulas using the two symbols M and W (for Mensch and Weib, that is, “man” and “woman”). From the M-W table for a person’s body, Weininger contended, you could read his or her character. Character as the physiognomy of sex! Hence the title of his book, Sex and Character. We’ll shortly see how Weininger’s gender-tables inspired Ludwig Wittgenstein’s truth-tables, a keystone of modern formal logic.
Weininger believed that formal logic was a kind of ladder to a higher realm. Any man (and it had to be a man) who climbed the ladder of formal logic to its end would come to a mystical vision of a transcendent, silent Truth. As part of this view, Weininger presented a novel view of the so-called “propositions of logic” (for example, that of identity, “A is A”). These logical propositions, said Weininger, are empty, adding nothing to our knowledge, but rather point the way to what is higher. We’ll shortly see how this view affected Ludwig Wittgenstein’s claim that the truths of logic are empty tautologies, regarded as one of Wittgenstein’s most original contributions to formal logic.
Weininger’s theory of character and his theory of formal logic were closely connected. Both were parts of a grand philosophical flight from the feminine. He took aspects of human character and thinking that patriarchal societies associated with domineering males and made them into exalted ideals of ethics and logic.
He did not draw out the political implications of his philosophy. Nonetheless, his fantasies fed the hunger of reactionary elements in Europe. They longed for a powerful male authority figure who would appear on the scene to solve all their problems. As the living embodiment of male decisiveness and authority, this hoped-for leader would put uppity women, homosexuals, and Jews in their place. Mussolini and Hitler played on such fantasies in plotting their separate paths to power.
Enter Ludwig
A quiet fourteen-year-old fan of the deceased Otto Weininger attended his funeral in 1903, scarcely noticed by anyone present: Ludwig Wittgenstein. Were it not for Wittgenstein, Weininger’s philosophy would surely have faded from the pages of history, the odd product of a disturbed mind. However, nineteen years after Weininger’s funeral, Wittgenstein slipped as much as he could of Weininger’s thought into the Western system of formal logic with the publication of his classic essay, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
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. 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. 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. In any case, 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. Unbeknownst to most fans of the Tractatus, the first three factors also characterized the young Ludwig Wittgenstein.
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 1973 that Wittgenstein had been gay, the executors, led by Anscombe, lambasted him and tried to stop the publication of his book.
In 1912, a 23-year-old Wittgenstein left Vienna for Cambridge University, there to study formal logic with Bertrand Russell, the greatest logician of the age. At the time, Russell, aided by Alfred North Whitehead, was publishing a monumental trilogy on formal logic, Principia Mathematica. Russell cultivated Wittgenstein as his protégé, even though the two disagreed on almost everything. Russell was an atheist and a materialist. He advocated a liberal educational system, free love, women’s suffrage, and repeal of laws against homosexuality. The young Wittgenstein, by contrast, was deeply religious. He believed in the old, authoritarian system of education and opposed women’s suffrage. While also homosexual, he was appalled by Russell’s liberalizing attitudes toward sex.
The disagreement spilled over into formal logic—but not at first. Russell wanted to demystify logic, to cut it loose from the metaphysical docks to which it had long been moored. He assumed that on this question at least, Wittgenstein was in the same boat, but he couldn’t have been more wrong.
In 1922, thanks to efforts by Russell, Wittgenstein managed to get a dense little book on formal logic published, namely the Tractatus. Russell (along with most readers then and since) understood very little of the book. Nonetheless, he praised it highly. The fame of Tractatus spread. The logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, understanding the book as little as Russell, praised the work too. Tractatus quickly became part of the canon of Western formal logic, where it remains to this day. Alas, most of the book’s readers, beginning with Russell, misconstrued the thrust of Tractatus. Many of the most incomprehensible passages were actually modeled after Otto Weininger’s mystical philosophy of logic in Sex and Character. Nothing could be farther from the views of Bertrand Russell and the Vienna Circle!
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Weininger’s Sex and Character share a common leitmotif: the ascent of the socially isolated male ego up the ladder of formal logic to a mystical vision of Truth. In Sex and Character, Weininger calls the loner who reaches this peak “Kant’s solitary man,” who “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.” In Tractatus, Wittgenstein presents his “elucidations” of logic and language as a ladder by which the enlightened loner transcends the world. Reaching the last rung, he throws away the ladder, realizing the truth of the book’s famous last line: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one keep silent” (prop. 7; my translation).
Tractatus is famous in formal logic for its notion of truth-tables. These are arrays in table form of various combinations of the letters T and F, standing for “true” and “false.” Today these arrays are used to define logical relations between propositions, like “either,” “and,” etc. Most commentators believe Wittgenstein developed his truth-tables from earlier hints in the works of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. Actually, modern logicians have misinterpreted Wittgenstein’s truth-tables. He did not intend them as a means of defining logical connectives between propositions but as the correct signs for propositions themselves. Also, he called them schemata, not truth-tables.
While influenced by Frege and Russell in other respects, Wittgenstein derived his truth-tables from Weininger’s gender-tables in Sex and Character, which used two symbols, M and W (for Mensch and Weib). By looking at a person’s M-W table, you can read off his or her overall character. Wittgenstein created tables using the two symbols W and F (for Wahr and Falsch). 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.
Wittgenstein’s tables had a mystical aspect because of something else he borrowed from Weininger, the notion that the truths of logic are empty tautologies. They don’t say anything about the world. Instead, they show unspeakable logical forms that point to higher visions. Yet many still regard Wittgenstein’s notion of the emptiness of logical truths as an original contribution to modern formal logic.
It can also be said that Weininger and Wittgenstein shared a common spirit that energized the homophobia and misogyny of each. In his Notebooks, Wittgenstein called it “the drive to the mystical” (der Trieb zum Mystischen). This amounted to a drive to flee sex and the body. Both the young Weininger and the young Wittgenstein were ashamed of being gay. They felt that it made them like women, whom they viewed as inferior. Their view that Jewish men are effeminate is what led them to anti-Semitism. These beliefs entangled both men in a deadly existential crisis, since they themselves were gay and of Jewish descent.
How to escape this crisis? Both men seized on formal logic as the quintessential masculine pursuit and the highest expression of the human mind. Formal logic would take them out of the realm of the flesh and their sexual urges. Following the path of pure logical forms—ones that said nothing but pointed to higher realities—the two hoped to find peace of mind in a silent Truth that transcended the material world. To be sure, such a strategy—the overcoming of erotic impulses by redirecting them into allegedly higher pursuits—is an old chestnut for emotionally isolated, closeted homosexuals with spiritual aspirations.
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.) Following Weininger’s lead, in Tractatus Wittgenstein rejected the view that language is a socially conditioned, materialistic phenomenon, as the socialists had argued. He rejected Russell’s liberal ideas on politics, culture, education, the condition of women, and sexual mores. He rejected the Vienna Circle’s enthusiasm for demolishing idealist philosophy and for creating a new philosophical method inspired by the sciences.
When Weininger’s importance to Wittgenstein is taken into account, Tractatus comes clearly into view on the stage of history for what it really was—the spiritual self-portrait of a tormented, proto-fascist 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—the nature of philosophy and formal logic.
The Logic of Homophobia
Weininger may have resolved his existential crisis by committing suicide at age 23, but Wittgenstein went on to develop a whole new view of logic, language, and philosophy. The major change is that Wittgenstein stopped trying so hard to flee the world of the senses. Instead of reaching for a crystalline palace of formal logic, he turned his attention to the rough-and-tumble world of language as used in everyday life. He also stopped demonizing his gay feelings, and was able to establish ongoing relationships with other gay men, including Francis Skinner and Ben Richards. Although Wittgenstein never fully came to terms with his sexuality, he was less of a mess in later life than he had been in his youth.
As Wittgenstein’s internalized homophobia and other-worldliness waned, so did his enthusiasm for formal logic. By the time he died in 1951, Wittgenstein had come to view formal logic as a parody of the way humans actually think. As he turned against formal logic, he also became increasingly skeptical of science and technology, writing in Culture and Value: “It isn’t absurd … to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion … that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap.”
In Wittgenstein’s quasi-spiritual condemnation of formal logic and science in the 1940’s we can hear a prelude to Allen Ginsberg’s political lamentations in the 60’s. However, Wittgenstein never imagined that by celebrating his own sexuality he might deepen his critique of modernity. For that deeper insight, we have to wait for the rise of the Beat poets in the 50’s, the countercultural prophets in the 60’s, and the movements for liberation by women and gay people in the 70’s.
Both Weininger and the early Wittgenstein combined two character traits: an enthusiasm for philosophy, and especially for formal logic, and a flight from the body, from sex, from the feminine, and from the world. Throughout Western history, logic-focused philosophy commonly reflects a similar pattern of alienation from the body. Bertrand Russell was the exception: a logician whose social philosophy was world-affirming and sexually exuberant. (Even so, his philosophy of logic clearly contradicted his social philosophy.) But for both Weininger and Wittgenstein, this linkage was especially strong. And when a gay philosopher buys into this sort of alienation, the philosophy he creates can easily turn into a logic of homophobia—taken by Weininger and the young Wittgenstein to exalted metaphysical heights.
Western logic’s 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—the 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. Whether expressed in gender-tables or truth-tables, the myth of bivalence has impeded our quest to understand the world. It’s time to throw it out. (So-called “fuzzy logic” has thrown out the myth of bivalence, although not other patriarchal myths that survive in logic.)
Gay men and lesbians who have a sense of self-worth are in a good position to lead the way in throwing out myths such as this. Doing so can broaden our understanding of reason, logic, and philosophy beyond the narrowness of patriarchal presuppositions. And that would contribute to enlightenment and liberation for all. Sometimes I wish that the young Ludwig Wittgenstein could have met the young Marty Robinson, the inventor of the zap. The encounter would have been a big jolt for each. But eventually both would have gained, and so would the world.
References
Abrahamsen, David. The Mind and Death of a Genius. Columbia University Press, 1946.
Bartley, William. Wittgenstein, 2nd edition. Open Court Press, 1985.
Russell, Bertrand, and Alfred North Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, 3 vols. (1910-1913). Cambridge University Press, 1960.
Weinberg, George H. Society and the Healthy Homosexual. Doubleday, 1972.
Weininger, Otto. Geschlecht und Charakter. Wilhelm Braumüller (Vienna), 1903.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Edited by G.H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman; translated by Peter Winch. Basil Blackwell (Oxford), 1980.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Notebooks 1914-1916, 2nd edition. Edited by G. H. Wright and G.E.M. Anscombe. University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922). Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. Routledge, 1961.
