Feeling and Reason and Their Relationship in The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

“Feeling” is the Descriptor of “Reason”

By looking at the way Werther speaks of his emotions in relation to Charlotte, it can be seen that “feeling” is just what alters “reason”. The two are not separate; they must go together. It is similar to the relationship between verbs and adverbs. An adverb cannot describe anything other than a verb. The adverb is what dictates how the verb will be performed. In the same fashion, feeling dictates how a person will reason. Werther’s descriptions of how he feels for Charlotte are indicators of how he will deal with his situation. Because he feels pain over this love, he reasons painfully as well. One might say that by committing suicide, he was just acting on his emotions and feelings, and therefore did not use reason at all. However, Werther’s feelings only enhanced his reason. If he had positive feelings, he might have done something equally as drastic, but in a happy, rather than depressed way.

Throughout Th`e Sorrows of Young Werther, Werther foreshadows his own death by telling of how sad and pained Charlotte’s absence makes him feel. He is describing how his reason will play out in the future. For now, though, all the reader can see is just that description. Werther states, “I am sometimes unconscious whether I really exist. If in such moments I find no sympathy, and Charlotte does not allow me to enjoy the melancholy consolation of bathing her hand with my tears, I feel compelled to tear myself from her,” . To put into plainer terms, he is saying that sometimes he isn’t sure if he exists, and in those times, if no one is around to feel badly for him, and he cannot comfort himself by crying into Charlotte’s hand, then he would rather not be around at all. This almost puts Werther in a selfish light. It is as if he is saying that if things do not go his way, then he doesn’t want to live. It is like everything has to be perfect all the time. These selfish feelings make for a selfish alteration to his reason. This quote also shows him as naïve because he cannot see that things can be flawed.

Another way that Werther describes how he will reason is dramatically. Suicide is a very big and bold statement, much like the things that Werther says about Charlotte: “The consolation Charlotte can bring to an invalid I experience from my own heart, which suffers more from her absence than many a poor creature lingering on a bed of sickness” . Again, to rephrase, what Werther is saying is that he has experienced first-hand how Charlotte can comfort a weak-minded person, and without her, he is suffering more than a person who is at the threshold of death. Not only is this very dramatic, and another indicator of how he will react later on, but it also points back to his selfishness and naiveté. To say that a dying creature cannot possibly be suffering more than him is self-centered. The naïve part of his statement is that he is talking about death as if he knows how it feels, and therefore can compare it to something. His dramatics make him overlook these facts.

Apart from his selfishness and naiveté, and as already stated, Werther foreshadows his death by speaking of how pained Charlotte’s absence makes him feel. But his biggest moment of foreshadowing in the book takes place when he says, “Whither am I going? I will tell you in confidence. I am obliged to continue a fortnight longer here, and then I think it would be better for me to visit the mines in—. But I am only deluding myself thus . . . ”. He’s unsure of where he is going, which can be looked at as similar to death. For those who believe that humans have an inner-self that leaves when one dies, there is no certainty of what happens to the human soul after death, if anything happens at all. Werther is saying that he feels obligated to continue on fighting for Charlotte’s affection for just a little longer, but that he then needs to get back to the real world. However, then he says he is “deluding” himself, as if he knows deep down he will never go back to not loving Charlotte. The same can be said about death. Once a person’s body, or in Werther’s case of suicide just a person, has committed to death, there is no going back. A switch cannot be flipped to put things back to the way they were. This statement foreshadows his suicide in that it can be read as a description of death. Another point this quote brings up is that Werther is not as naïve as one might think. Although there is a lot he doesn’t know, he does know enough about himself to say that his mind will not leave Charlotte. Werther continues, “ . . . The fact is, I wish to be near Charlotte again, that is all. I smile at the suggestions of my heart, and obey its dictates” . He is failing to see that the heart is the source of these reason descriptors. It is like the brain provides pure, unbiased reason that will come up with the safest and most effective solution, and the heart is a machine that provides feelings to alter that pureness. One cannot simply obey one over the other. They work as a pair, and if anything, choosing to only obey the feelings will do nothing but harm.

Werther’s death is not only caused by his depression over Charlotte, but it is also caused by his lack of dealing with it in a healthy manner. Charlotte, on the other hand, knows exactly how to deal with this, and proves so by saying, “We talked of the pleasures of dancing. "If it is a fault to love it," said Charlotte, "I am ready to confess that I prize it above all other amusements. If anything disturbs me, I go to the piano, play an air to which I have danced, and all goes right again directly" . . . ”. She doesn’t act on the first negative thought that comes into her mind. When she feels like something is bothering her, she does what many people might do today, and turns to music to calm herself. She prevents the negative thoughts in order to prevent negative reasoning. This shows that she is aware of this “adverb-verb” relationship between her feelings and her rationale. Werther then continues, “ . . . You, who know me, can fancy how steadfastly I gazed upon her rich dark eyes during these remarks, how my very soul gloated over her warm lips and fresh, glowing cheeks, how I became quite lost in the delightful meaning of her words, so much so, that I scarcely heard the actual expressions” . It is almost like Charlotte is the Enlightenment and Werther is Romanticism. Werther is so mesmerized by Charlotte that he misses her point. He is seeing that Charlotte enjoys the piano and dance, but is focusing more on things like her eyes and lips. He can’t see that Charlotte does these activities because they are neutralizers for her. They tone down the drastic descriptors that certain events can bring up in order to better her reason. It is like there is a spectrum for reason, and feelings indicate whether or not one is high or low. Charlotte’s music puts her back in the healthy middle, while Werther’s preoccupation and infatuation bring him lower and lower every day.

Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther help explain the complicated relationship between feeling and reason. Many might think that the two are separate things, much how people think of religion and science. The reality, though, is that feeling and reason have a relationship that explains why it is that humans react the way they do in specific situations. For the sake of this argument, I would like to officially call it the “adverb-verb” relationship. Reason simply gets altered by a person’s feelings. This is why Werther chooses to take his own life. His reason was so clouded with pain and depression over one thing that his rationale was not able to see through it all. The spectrum mentioned earlier was a way of showing this idea visually, and hopefully made things easier to understand. One can picture reason as a horizontal line. The middle of that line is where things are untouched, pure. No feelings have interfered yet. The further left indicates how negatively feelings are affecting, and the further right indicates how positively feelings are affecting. This is not to say that the positive end equals good outcomes. For example, I might be feeling so happy and positive one day that I decide to blow off all my homework and go to the beach. The reality is that I would fall behind drastically. Therefore, in the end, the closer to the middle the better off a person will be. The Sorrows of Young Werther show this relationship by portraying a character who falls on the negative side of the spectrum.