Katie 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.

Hedwig Dohm is a radical German feminist whose work critically engages Nietzsche's writings. In this article, I develop and draw out the implications of a Dohmian critique of Nietzschean nihilism by looking closely at Dohm's novella Become Who You Are!. In this novella, Dohm provides an extended case study of two distinct types of Nietzschean nihilism common to women living in Germany in the late nineteenth century. And Dohm's writings illuminate a double standard in Nietzsche's theory of nihilism: Overcoming nihilism is going to require greater effort for a woman than it will for a man. Dohm emphasizes the challenges that women face in overcoming nihilism. Women must first throw off the shackles of oppressive systems of social norms and institutions in order to reveal a new or different way of interpreting themselves and their world.

This article discusses Nietzsche's response in The Birth of Tragedy (BT) to what he calls the wisdom of Silenus, that “the very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is to die soon.” I begin by analyzing the view that Silenus expresses a proto-Schopenhauerian truth about the world as “Will.” I then review Bernard Reginster's interpretation of the wisdom of Silenus as an early form of Nietzschean nihilism. As an alternative to these readings, I argue that, for Nietzsche, Silenus's wisdom addresses a crucial, existential dimension of ancient Greek tragic culture. I conclude by pointing out that, in BT, Nietzsche locates nihilism not in the wisdom of Silenus, but in the advent of Socratism.