Katherine Brennan

This paper has two primary aims. First, it seeks to bring philosophical attention to the understudied and overlooked work of Clara Zetkin. Second, it endeavours to demonstrate Zetkin’s unique philosophical contribution to the joint issues of women and socialism. I argue that Zetkin’s socialist feminism developed in response to two intersecting social movements of the late nineteenth century: the women’s movement and the labour movement. Zetkin contends that for either movement to be successful, they must work together. Yet, she meets resistance from both sides. Despite her commitment to Marxist philosophy and the socialist cause, Zetkin opposes members of the labour party who seek to prevent women from working outside the home and exclude women from their political organizing. Zetkin joins the larger women’s movement in her advocacy for the economic, political, and legal rights of women. Yet, she differentiates her socialist feminism from that of the bourgeois feminists, who, she argues, overlook the needs and interests of working women.

Nietzsche’s comments on Shakespeare’s Hamlet reveal a subtle shift in his thinking about skepticism. In The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche describes Hamlet pejoratively as a skeptic who manifests the values of Christian morality and the acetic ideal. Yet in Ecce Homo and Nietzsche Contra Wagner, Nietzsche revalues Hamlet as someone whose suffering imparts certainty, nobility, and poignancy. Nietzsche’s writings on skepticism are equally ambiguous and, when read together with Nietzsche’s comments on Hamlet, reflect a revaluation of skepticism and suffering between his earlier (1882–86) writings and his final writings of 1888. In 1888, Nietzsche associates both Hamlet and skepticism with “certainty.” This “certainty” is a form of self-assurance, rooted in the passions, that allows one to be strong enough to experiment with new perspectives without becoming subject to fanatical convictions.