As events were still unfolding in Belarus, playwright Andrei Kureichik turned to documentary theatre following the 2020 fraudulent election and vicious crackdown against protestors in an effort to share the story and compel an international community to press for action against Aliaksandr Lukashenka's regime. As a member of the Coordination Council created by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya to publicly challenge the election results and hold Lukashenka's government accountable for unlawful actions, Kureichik left Belarus when he was called before an investigative committee shortly after the election. On August 20, 2020, according to the BBC, the Prosecutor General of Belarus opened a criminal case against the Coordination Council, a representative body made up of a core group of 110 Belarusian leaders in a range of disciplines organized by Tsikhanouskaya and her team, for its efforts to “seize power” and harm national security. Kureichik was advised to leave immediately or face indefinite imprisonment.3 Despite what he felt were absurd allegations, he knew there was no rule of law in Belarus and left his home on August 21, 2020.

In exile, still in shock from the severity of Lukashenka's violence toward the opposition, Kureichik immediately went to work using the only tools at his disposal—his playwriting skills and network of theatre workers. In September 2020, he wrote the play Insulted. Belarus., which directly represents the clash between Lukashenka's regime and the pro-democracy resistance in 2020, using real names and verbatim texts along with fictional, metaphorical material that captures the feelings, as he experienced it, of the August events. The following year, Kureichik wrote the play Voices of the New Belarus, an entirely verbatim piece based on the real texts of real political prisoners in Belarus.

Wittgenstein – Life and Works

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in 1889 in Vienna, the eighth child of Karl and Leopoldine Wittgenstein. The family was of Jewish descent, although they had converted to Catholicism a generation earlier. Karl Wittgenstein was the leading Austrian steel baron – the Carnegie of the Austrian steel industry – and one of the wealthiest men in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was a great patron of the arts, and the family's palatial home in Vienna was the leading music salon there at the turn of the century. Brahms was a friend of the family, Mahler frequented the house, and Bruno Walter, Joseph Joachim and young Pablo Casals all played at the Wittgenstein musical evenings. Young Ludwig was brought up in an haute-bourgeois family of great cultivation and refined sensibility, wide intellectual and artistic interests, and a powerful sense of social and moral obligation.

Wittgenstein was taught at home by private tutors until the age of 14, after which he went to school in Linz. After graduating from high school, he went to study for a diploma in engineering at a technical college in Berlin. He completed the diploma course in 1908. Having become interested in the budding science of aeronautics, he went to Manchester University to do research on flight and subsequently on a jet reaction propeller. It was while doing this that he came across, and became fascinated by, the writings of Gottlob Frege and of Bertrand Russell on the philosophy of logic and mathematics. The upshot was that he went to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1911 to read for an advanced degree under the supervision of Russell. Russell later described him at this period as being ‘perhaps the most perfect example I have known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense and dominating’.1 Within six months, the two men were discussing philosophy as equals, and Russell looked upon Wittgenstein as his successor in philosophical research.2 Between 1913 and early 1917, Wittgenstein worked on composing materials for his first philosophical masterpiece: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In this work, he confronted the views of his two great predecessors and mentors, the German mathematical logician Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, undermining their conceptions of logic as a science with a subject matter.

The Philosophical Investigations (1953) is one of the most revolutionary philosophical works ever written. It ploughs up the fields of philosophical thought on the nature of language and linguistic meaning, on the relation between language and reality, on metaphysics, on the relation between language and thinking, on the nature of the mind, on self-knowledge and knowledge of others, and on the nature of philosophy itself. On each subject, Wittgenstein dug down to the roots of our reflections, exposing our tacit, often mistaken, presuppositions.

Wittgenstein wrote the Investigations in a laid-back colloquial style. It is easy to see what he says. On the other hand, it is difficult to understand why he says what he says. It is also easy to misinterpret what he wrote and to ascribe to him views that he did not hold. It is not surprising that misinterpretations of Wittgenstein's ideas are common among twenty-first century philosophers, who are more eager to dismiss his views than to understand what they are.

Having spent more than 25 years working intensively on Wittgenstein's philosophy in general, and on the Investigations in particular, and reaching the end of my long career of teaching and writing philosophy, it seemed to me that I was at long last ready to publish a beginner's guide to some of the central themes in his masterpiece. What I present here is not a textbook. It does not examine the multitudinous interpretations of Wittgenstein (I have done that in great detail in a dozen other books), although widespread criticisms of Wittgenstein are examined and refuted. It does not attempt to examine all the major themes in the Investigations – but only those that, in my judgement, are the most likely to interest beginners. So, for example, I have not discussed Wittgenstein's important scrutiny of the concept of following a rule, for that is too difficult and unlikely to excite the imaginations of those I wish to guide around select landmarks in his book. What I have written is directed at open-minded readers, who know no philosophy but who are willing to grapple with Wittgenstein's radical arguments in order to gain insight into subjects that are of concern to any thinking person.

Introduction

The ideological construction of the Cold War in the 1950s responded to the need to outline a geopolitical strategy capable of sustaining the interests of the United States and the Soviet Union. In order to accomplish that aim, the superpowers resorted to the essential aspects of their founding ideologies, namely American Exceptionalism and Eurasianism. Metapolitics is important in understanding the functioning of the international order. The actions set in motion by the superpowers in the 1950s coincided with the evolution of the strategic situation that unfolded during that decade. Cultural values served to demarcate the boundaries of rational action. What was considered to be rational differed for each superpower, for they both held different cultural values. The social practices that emerged from these cultural values responded to an essentialist ideology informed by notions of American Exceptionalism and Eurasianism, which had a significant heuristic component that allowed the leadership of both countries to deploy a workable scheme of international relations capable of bolstering their geopolitical standing. Therefore, it is important to determine the metapolitical tenets that guided the actions of the United States and the Soviet Union in world affairs during the 1950s and the manner in which they served to legitimize their system of government. These factors were of significant importance in the creation of an essentialist construction of the international order in the 1950s, which was aimed toward meeting the geopolitical needs of the United States and the Soviet Union.

The Importance of Metapolitics in the Understanding of the Evolution of the Cold War

The actions undertaken by the United States and the Soviet Union responded to essentialist accounts of the notion of civilization. The actions undertaken by the superpowers during the 1950s attest to the fact that certain practices arise as a result of long-held beliefs about the way in which a particular community should engage with the world. The “exceptionalist” attitude espoused by Washington was aimed at satisfying specific political interests. Communism succeeded in entrenching itself in power in the Soviet Union due to its quasi-religious qualities. Berdyaev states that “Russia has always been full of mystical and prophetic sects and among them there has always been a thirst for the transfiguration of life [and that] the religion of the soil is very strong in the Russian people [as] it lies deep down in the very foundations of the Russian soul.”

Wittgenstein and religious expressivism

Religious belief is widely thought to be irrational: a view about the world for which there is no reliable evidence and which can easily be explained as the product of upbringing, tradition uncritically accepted and naive wishful thinking. Indeed, it is not only ill-supported; there is reason to doubt whether its tenets ultimately make any sense. Its very consistency is threatened by a number of conceptual problems related to the notion of an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent being. Wittgenstein would have agreed with this critical view: as a hypothesis to be assessed in cold blood in the light of its evidence and coherence, theism is a lost cause. And yet he did not dismiss the belief in God as necessarily irrational. It may not be reasonable, but it need not be unreasonable either (LC 58). How is that possible? How can one be an ‘honest religious thinker’, in other words, how can one combine being a thinker – a rational person –, being honest – not deceiving oneself –, and being religious – believing in God. It is possible, according to Wittgenstein, but it is extremely difficult: a tightrope walk.

The problem, in short, is how to reconcile the following two statements held by Wittgenstein:

• (A) As a hypothesis, God's existence (etc.) is extremely implausible.

• (B) Christian faith is not unreasonable.

To achieve this reconciliation, it has been suggested that Christian faith, according to Wittgenstein, does not actually involve any metaphysical beliefs. Credal statements should be seen merely as figurative expressions of a certain attitude towards life or as part of a ritualistic practice expressive of such an attitude (Phillips 1993). But the obvious objection to such an expressivist construal of credal statements is that it is not a correct account of the actual religious language-game.

The most detailed account of Wittgenstein's views on aesthetics can be found in his 1938 lectures (published in LC), together with some scattered remarks all over his notebooks, many of which have been collected in Culture and Value. His earlier discussion of aesthetics in his lectures in 1933, taken down by Alice Ambrose and published in 1979 (AL), presents largely the same ideas but is much sketchier. The 2016 publication of G. E. Moore's more detailed notes of the same lectures (M), however, enriches the picture in interesting ways. It is still recognisably the same approach to aesthetics we know from the 1938 lectures, but it sheds more light on the emergence of Wittgenstein's ideas. In the following, I shall try to complement the previous two chapters’ presentation of Wittgenstein's views on aesthetics with a more genetic account based, after a cursory glance at earlier writings, on some of the details of the 1933 lectures.

‘Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same’

The first mention of aesthetics in Wittgenstein's works is in a gnomic remark towards the end of the Tractatus asserting that ‘Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same’ (TLP 6.421). What does Wittgenstein mean by that?

Could that sentence be an expression of aestheticism: the outrageous idea that moral issues are to be regarded from a purely aesthetic point of view? It would appear that, on such a view, a violent crime could be good, provided it was perpetrated with style and elegance. But then we should probably not say that ethics and aesthetics coincide, but rather that ethics is replaced by aesthetics. We would just abolish moral considerations in favour of aesthetic ones.

On another possible reading, the proposition would advocate the inverse encroachment: a thorough moralism to hold sway in aesthetics. The aesthetic value of a work of art or literature would simply be reduced to its moral or political value. Plato and Tolstoy sometimes denied the existence of genuinely aesthetic value – value that was not moral or cognitive – but their own literary practice gave the lie to such radical claims. At any rate, this too would not be a case of ethics and aesthetics being identical; it would mean that aesthetics was subsumed under ethics (cf. Appelqvist 2013, p. 45).

As a young African writer from South Africa, I argue that the development project after World War II, rooted in the modernization paradigm, urgently needs to be reinterpreted in the context of, and against, the European Enlightenment project that traces its roots to the voyages of discovery from the late fourteenth century onwards. It has become abundantly clear that development ideas and practices grounded in this model will not bring about the development that Africa wants, but will continue to undermine African development initiatives and cement the Global North's domination agenda. I argue that African reconceptualization of its ideal development model should be grounded within the riches of African history and culture and needs to position Africans as their own agents, and not as objects. Only such a reconceptualization can liberate African development from parochial Eurocentric models.

We must shift the geography of reasoning and analysis away from a Eurocentric epistemology, towards African-centred epistemologies, in particular, using Afrocentricity as a revolutionary intellectual paradigm in our quest to liberate the discourse of development from the continuing bias towards the Eurocentric ideological framework. By doing so, we can work on a model that privileges African knowledge, informed by African history, culture and African agency, towards an African reawakening. I, therefore, deploy Afrocentricity as a relevant theoretical framework to relocate the interpretation of development to an African context to enable relevance to Africa. As Asante explains, Afrocentricity establishes an intellectual standpoint in which phenomena are viewed from the perspective of African people as centred within their own historical and cultural experiences. Such a perspective enables African people to take control of their own lives and be their own agents. This will allow them to become subjects rather than objects of others’ (under)development agenda. Afrocentricity as a paradigm enables a re-examination of all dimensions of the dislocation of African people resulting from the imposition of Western thought, be it regarding culture, economics, psychology, health or religious ideas around African societies, and development in general. This interrogation and reflection will enable Africans to assert themselves epistemically, thus dismantling their entrapment in the Western epistemic colonization of the terms of reference, and enabling African people to speak as their own agents of the change that they desire, rather than merely existing as ideological dependants of the European canon of thought.

Culture stands out as a critical aspect of Afrocentricity in terms of an analysis of what should inform the Afrocentric development trajectory in Africa and for Africans in the diaspora. The European invasion of Africa set in motion cultural imperialism that resulted in the dislocation of African people from their own cultural grounding.

As I have mentioned in Chapter 3, the discourse of development in Africa has remained deeply entangled in colonially imposed matrices of power. It has not enabled Africans to imagine development from the perspective of their own history and cultural experiences. Such a perspective on development has only imposed on Africa a tendency to mimic the European modernization project as the sole model that should define what development is for Africa because the conceptualization of mainstream development in the aftermath of World War II was guided by modernization theory, with its extension as a neoliberal framework derived from the experiences of Western countries.

The main challenge facing Africa since the fifteenth century, which marks the start of mercantilism and Christianization, is the need for Africans to find their own voices and a cultural anchor for their endeavour to shape Africa's development prospects. Epistemic colonization by European scholars produced a continent dependent on Europeans to define the value of African's culture, including what that culture meant for the development future of Africa. Their agenda was to create Africans who think from a European perspective and who will forever remain dependent beneficiaries of Europe. Marimba Ani in her book Yuguru: An Afrikan-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behaviour, therefore, attacks European cultural imperialism in her reference to the concept of asili, the central seed or germinating matrix of a culture, to expose how European white supremacist thought believes in its own superiority to the denigration of African culture and humanity. As a result of the Eurocentrism of development discourse, African development discourse has for too long accepted the idea of the ‘catch-up thesis’, as Mkandawire calls it, which presents the development in Africa as seeking to be like the West – industrialized and modern.

Marcus Garvey, a noted Pan-Africanist activist, journalist and entrepreneur, wrote that ‘a people without knowledge of their historical past and culture is like a tree without roots. When all we know is the history written by those who conquered us, we remain shackled and submerged beneath their own narratives.’

The story of Africa's development trajectory must be anchored within our own African narratives. Throughout its unfolding as a theory of social change, Afrocentricity has consistently and systematically rewritten African history as a contribution to African development itself, and as part of the broader agenda of the restoration of African humanity. The objective of an Afrocentric historicism is to rediscover Africa's contributions to human civilization as the launching pad for Africa's rediscovery of itself, as opposed to the current habit of Africans always seeking to adjust to the European game plan. Thus, in Afrocentricity, an understanding of the corrected record of Africa's historical trajectory is a prerequisite for Africa's reconceptualization of its own development ideal. At the centre of an African reawakening must lie the imperative of understanding how the people of this continent have lived in their own environment to improve their quality of life. This implies that consistently and systematically challenging Eurocentric negative tropes about Africa as an uncivilized, unmodern, underdeveloped and backward continent is part of Afrocentricity's work of reclaiming their history from Eurocentric distortions and of countering the falsification of information about Africa.

The theft of Africa's history has gone hand in hand with a denial of African genius and agency. The consistent pattern of the negation of Africa by European writers has contributed to a denigration of African voices and to a devaluing of African contributions to world civilization. It is against this pervasive European epistemic injustice against Africans that Afrocentricity as a paradigm of the African Renaissance is committed to addressing the need for history to be reinterpreted from a perspective in which African people stand as subjects and not objects of European analysis. Moreover, Afrocentric historiography provides a clearer perspective on Africa's pursuit for Africa's own advancement. Thus, the discourse of development in Africa must be liberated from the factors that have negatively shaped Africa and its people, relegating them to the lower political, social and economic structures of the modern world system, which continues to be dominated by Europe and North America.

In Chapters 4 and 5, I discussed two prominent aspects of Afrocentricity, namely history and culture, and their significance for the reconceptualization of an Afrocentric development paradigm. Only European–North American history and culture informed the Truman development paradigm in the aftermath of World War II, as discussed in Chapter 3, and this model was a dismal failure in Africa because it was founded on erroneously universalized predictions grounded on modernization theory, which further deracinated Africans from their history and culture. This chapter discusses the role of African agency as the third aspect of Afrocentricity important for the reimagination of an Afrocentric development trajectory. The chapter examines Pan-Africanism and African nationalism as important ideological frameworks that undergird African agency to combat European domination. The chapter argues that the future of Africa can only be attained when Africans themselves act in their own best interests. Therefore, Africans must think, plan, implement and be the beneficiaries of their own development plans. They may not be reduced to puppets of the European games of conquest but should take charge of their own lives and map out their own futures.

It is important to note that the advent of modernity, which began in the late fifteenth century, ushered in European domination over Africa and dislocated Africans from their historical and cultural patterns of life, and converted Africans into European subjects. The domination of Africans from that time on set in motion the processes for Africa's dismemberment and loss of its own agency. As I have highlighted in Chapter 4, Africa was stripped of ownership of its contributions to world civilization and came to be considered a place occupied by sub-human savages without a history or culture. This was part of the European pattern of denigrating Africans to elevate the European human experience as the superior model for all. Thus, the invention of racism from the fifteenth century onwards became a strategy and a device to classify human beings in terms of their descriptive physical qualities and to create hierarchies, placing Africans in the lowest echelons of humanity. This racist claim was then used to justify the colonial invasion of Africa and the overthrow of African kings, making them and their people obedient subjects.

Wittgenstein once remarked that while he took some interest in scientific questions, only conceptual and aesthetic questions could really grip him (CV 91). He was passionate about music and literature, and the sporadic aesthetic observations in his notebooks show a profound understanding of these art forms. He tried his hand at drawing and sculpture. For a couple of years, he worked as an architect, together with Paul Engelmann, building a house in Vienna for his sister Margaret Stonborough, completed in 1928 (see Wijdeveld, 1993; Hyman, 2016). In 1933 and again in 1938, he gave some lectures on aesthetics, students’ notes of which have since been published. And yet, in Wittgenstein's philosophical writings, aesthetics is only ever touched upon in passing.

One of the points that will, I hope, emerge from the following presentation is that the lack of sustained work on philosophical aesthetics in Wittgenstein's writings is not entirely accidental. For on his view, aesthetic issues are not susceptible of an abstract philosophical treatment. They belong to art criticism rather than philosophy, and what is more, their discussion can only be addressed to an audience sharing a specific cultured taste.

What cannot be said

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein stated that ‘Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same’ (TLP 6.421), and hence equally ineffable. On this view, works of art can make manifest things that cannot be said. In a letter to his friend Paul Engelmann, he comments on the poem Graf Eberhards Weißdorn by Ludwig Uhland:

The claim that something important shows itself but cannot be put into words is generously employed in Wittgenstein's early philosophy but absent from his later writings. He critically reverts to the idea of unutterable contents of works of art or other objects of aesthetic contemplation in the 1930s, in the ‘Brown Book’, and more briefly in Philosophical Investigations, introducing a distinction between two kinds of cases in which we employ the terms ‘understanding’, ‘expression’, ‘meaning’, or ‘says something’.