*** The Horse by OTTO WEININGER ***

The Horse
by OTTO WEININGER, from On last things (ÜBER DIE LETZTEN DINGE (1904/1907), translation by Steven Burns

Even before I began to think as an animal psychologist about the horse, the horse's
head had made a remarkable impression on me; it was an impression of unfreedom. At the
same time I understood that this horse's head could have a strange effect. The horse's
constant nodding is extremely puzzling. Without the same certainty I had about the dog, but
nevertheless as an enlightening thought, the idea suddenly came to me that the horse
represents insanity.
The alogical behaviour of the horse speaks in favour of this. Its nervousness and
neurasthenia, which horse breeders complain and wonder about so much, are related to
insanity.
Insanity, however, is the opposite of logic and epistemology (perhaps only of the
latter?) Anyone who tries to find his way about in these disciplines is constantly at risk of
insanity. Logical thought is problematic for him, and this is the direction in which his
original sin is mainly to be sought. That is why the insane person has nothing of the
criminal in him. People who live in fear of insanity do not know fear of the devil, and vice
versa. The criminal or saint (as the criminal in reverse) has a moderately secure, shrewd
ability to orient himself in thought, and does not have to undergo any struggles of
“intellectual conscience”.
Genius is either the reverse of perfect insanity, or the reverse of perfect criminality.
Each genius lives in fear of one or the other. He must hold his own, at every moment of his
life and most vigorously at the greatest moments, against one 107
of these two forms of nothingness; he must set himself against it. The ego, genius, is an
action (“eternally young”), a perpetual yes!
People for whom the ethical is problematic, either fear the lie, or are given to lying;
people for whom logic is problematic hate and fear insanity, or succumb to it. Now insanity
always produces a strange look, and so the horse's skull looks strange, too.
I have also found a morphological approximation of the horse's head in various people
who have a fear of insanity.
The dog barks at the horse, because the evil barks at the good.
The horse is also in other respects the opposite of the dog: it is aristocratic and very
selective in the choice of sexual partners.
The existence of the nag, though, constitutes an objection to my hypothesis, just as the
aristocratic dogs (St. Bernards, certain Doggen11) seem to do.
Crime is directed against the sense of time; logic is timeless. Perhaps that is why the
horse has no relation (not even the relation of loss) to past and future.
The aristocratic genius is strongly related to insanity (Nietzsche, even more Lenau);
the plebeian genius has a strong relationship to crime (Beethoven, Knut Hamsun, Kleist).