Asimmetrie che contano. Wittgenstein sul dolore, la prima persona e le altre menti.

In this paper, I present some of Wittgenstein’s insights on being in pain. Simple and common as it is, this state offers a “place” to explore what distinguishes the perspective that subjects have on their “mental” lives. Commenting on paragraphs from the well-known “private language argument” and other remarks on the philosophy of psychology, I will try to show that, criticizing the so-called “Cartesian picture”, Wittgenstein does not conceive of the difference between my first-person awareness of my pain and third-person access to it as an epistemological asymmetry. I suggest that, according to him, the perspective that a person has on a state such as being in pain is to be explained in terms of a sense of belonging, of the pain’s being hers as she is the one who can express it. Since Wittgenstein claims that other people often know when I am in pain, I also briefly present his view on what allows us to provide an account of what others feel and show that it does not rule out a (viable) sense of privacy.