[coverup]

Just to add some color to your comment as I think the idea that philosophy can be therapeutic is counterintuitive for a lot of people: consider the loneliness of depression, a big part of which (at least for me) is the seemingly insolvable problem of being trapped in my own head. "No one else could possibly understand how I feel" seems to be true not even just for me, but for the human condition. We're not mind-readers.

Nonsense, Wittgenstein seems to argue. If no one else could understand how you feel even in principle, then neither could you. If you can talk about it then people will understand, because we use the same words the same way. And when we don't, it's not because of some kind of epistemological solitary confinement - it's just a misunderstanding, and there are language games for resolving those too.

You don't have to read philosophy to know that "no one else could possibly understand how I feel" is actually a common sentiment, though. The truly therapeutic part for me was the idea that even though there may be problems that can't be solved, they can sometimes be dissolved. (i.e. seeing the problem statement itself as nonsense)

[mabub24]

I wholeheartedly agree. Wittgenstein's arguments are rather uplifting in the sense that they make very clear the commonalities of being human, that, with all of the incredible variations of culture, you can take steps for "bridging the gap" so to speak, and often that just means communicating and interacting with other people, learning a form of life to learn what animates the people that live it.

The private language argument had a similar effect for me, but more-so in dissolving the insistence some people make over subjective vs. objective. Through the private language argument, you see that that opposition is really more about personal vs. public. Wittgenstein does not dissolve the personal; but the private language argument does dissolve the kind of fundamentally private subjectivity that people often reference or hold in that debate on subjective vs. objective.