Both he and Edmund Husserl seem to have been inspired by Mach's work Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations, 1886) to formulate their very similar concepts of Gestalt and Figural Moment respectively.
[6] Ehrenfels's starting point was that with many species of animals such as whales, walruses, elephants, lions, etc., the strongest male has a harem, which for him was sufficient proof that this was what nature had intended for humanity.
[11] In a 1908 essay, the proud aristocrat Baron von Ehrenfels called the demand for universal equality in the Austrian Empire being made by the Social Democrats "preposterous".
[12] In April 1895, the German Emperor Wilhelm II had a nightmare where all the nations of Europe appeared as "prehistoric warrior goddesses" who were protected by Germany which took the form of the Archangel Michael.
[13] To the East, they were threatened by a dark, stormy cloud in which a Chinese-style dragon carried a Buddha wreathed in fire under which marched millions of Asians who destroyed all in their path, killing all whites.
[14] From 1895 onwards, Ehrenfels was greatly influenced by the "Yellow Peril" propaganda put out by the German government, in which Wilhelm repeatedly warned of the alleged Asian menace to the West.
[14] As a Wagnerite who deeply involved in the various Wagner societies in Vienna, Ehrenfels got to know Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg, the German ambassador to Austria-Hungary and an anti-Asian racist who promoted the fear of the "Yellow Peril" to anybody who would listen.
[16] Ehrenfels wrote with alarm that: "the average constitutional strength of the Chinese, their resistance to overwork and...noxious and prejudicial influences of all kinds...exceeds that of the civilized peoples of the West to an astonishing degree".
[16] In Ehrenfels's new society, only those white men who proved themselves to be social "winners" would be allowed to marry, and the number of wives a man could have would be based upon his degree of success.
[18] Ehrenfels maintained in his new society that henceforward only the "specifically sexual element" in relations between the sexes would matter and other "motives alien to breeding" like romantic love would done away with in order to improve the white race.
[22] Subsequently, Ehrenfels made a public appeal to "manly Aryan men" who had proved themselves to be both "social winners" and "studs" to disregard monogamy and marriage, and to start impregnating as many women as possible to give the "white race" a genetic edge in the coming war against the "Yellow Peril".
[21] Once that happened, Ehrenfels warned that a vast Sino-Japanese army would set to conquer the world consisting of genetically superior soldiers whom the Western powers would be unable to stop.
[26] Ehrnefels's opposition to romantic love and his unabashed celebration of sexual pleasure as part of the evolutionary duties of racial improvement fitted in well to the new age.
[26] Katz noted that those who saw sexual desires as the core of relationships between men and women almost always justified this with reference to human "need", "drive" or "instinct" to pass on their genes.
The German feminist Helene Stöcker protested against Ehrenfels's plans, albeit from the same social Darwinian viewpoint, writing: "A sexual ethic that does not rest on the development of women as a personality, but instead regards her merely as an object of male lust, is absolutely counter-evolutionary".
[29] Besides that, Ehrenfels complained constantly about "indecent puns" used by ordinary people, the "courtesan style" in modern fashion and by the "pornography of the humorous weeklies, in comic songs, farces and operettas".
[14] The "flight from domesticity" novels typically dealt with a ruggedly tough male who lived life on his own terms, usually alone and always in some remote frontier place, and who almost never had a relationship with a woman or children.
The typical hero in Reid's novels which were extremely popular in the United States and Europe was described as being: "gallant, skillful at arms, far more at ease around men than around women, has lots of time for trappers and soldiers but little for the upper classes and intellectuals, and is much happier hunting and killing than thinking.
"[32] Tosh argued by the end of the 19th century, the burdens of being a husband and a father in a modern, industrialized, urban society were such that many men fantasized about "chucking it all" to escape domesticity; to live a life unburdened by the demands of a job, children, a wife or any other social obligation.
[33] Theweleit wrote that right-wing German men who had served in the Freikorps during the interwar period were obsessed with proving their masculinity by establishing their "hardness", and that the water imagery reflected their fear of women, the erotic, love, intimacy, and of dependence, all things that threatened to make them less than manly.
Our morality tries to cover the matter...instead of sexual provision we speak of a unity of souls and the contractual agreement to coitus...is more or less transparently veiled by the term 'community of bed and table'".
[37] Dickson wrote that Ehrenfels's efforts to deny that a man could ever love a woman suggested a huge fear of emotional dependence on his part.
One of the founders of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, Magnus Hirschfeld, the German sexologist and gay rights advocate, was a well known figure in the German-speaking world in the early 20th century and his theories were much debated.
[39] In 1899, Hirschfeld had argued in an essay: "that in all mental and physical characteristics there are only gradual, quantitative differences between men and women, that between them, in every respect, there are all sorts of mixed forms in extraordinary diversity".
[39] Ehrenfels could not accept Hirschfeld's theory that some people were born gay as it contradicted his view of male sexuality as an aggressive drive to pass on one's genes too much.
Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, while probably closer to outright mental illness, exhibited similar traits-including manic activity, intellectual eclecticism, megalomania, occasional nervous breakdowns, genocidal cogitations, and concern with the 'Yellow Peril'.
[38] Dickinson further noted the great irony of Ehrenfels's life, namely that his own biography disapproved his theories about men as sex-crazed animals incapable of love for either the women in their lives or their children.
Within the first decade of the 20th century some of the more radical members of the eugenicist-Social Darwinist movement in Germany were already advocating killing the physically and/or mentally disabled as the best way of improving the Aryan race.
[42] Had Ehrenfels lived long enough, he would have been appalled by the Action T4 program launched by the German government in January 1939 to exterminate all physically and mentally disabled people in the Reich (which by that time included Austria).
[41] In this, Ehrenfels parted company with his friend Houston Stewart Chamberlain who believed in the coming great "race war" that the Asians together with the blacks would fight under the leadership of the Jews against the Aryans.