A Glimpse at the Language Game of Feelings

It is common place to consider feelings as private; but Wittgenstein disagrees. He believes such an idea leads to agnosticism and solipsism. According to the common understanding, feelings are private in two senses: 1. in an epistemological sense, which has two aspects: a) only an individual can know one’s own feelings; b) no one can know others’ feelings (Wittgenstein believes that the first aspect is meaningless and the second one is wrong). 2. The second sense is related to “having”, that is, each person has one’s own feelings; therefore, there are no similar feelings in two different persons (Wittgenstein insists that this sense is wrong too).This article tries to show that Wittgenstein considers the privacy of feelings a merely grammatical subject, without designating a private matter. Of course, he thinks that feelings can be private as far as they remain secrete and have no external expression.