When Do We Give Our Emotions Too Much Gravity and Weight?

A Cautionary Tale

Since the Age of Enlightenment in the 1700s, the world over has placed a heavy emphasis on reason and logic. Goethe’s book “The Sorrows of Young Werther” gives some pushback to this philosophically, but in a cautionary way.

FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS TAKEN TOO FAR

Werther allows his love and obsession for Charlotte, a woman he couldn’t have, to become so overwhelming he sees suicide as his only option. Werther accepted suicide as his fate to deal with his unremitted love for Charlotte. Towards the end of Goethe’s “Sorrows of Young Werther,” Werther borrows pistols from Charlotte’s husband to commit suicide. The book was basically a slow and impending doom that led to tragedy. Werther allowed his emotions to dominate his life, and logic wasn’t even part of the equation.

Throughout the book, Werther only cares about his feelings and no one else around him matter to him. This is a problem that still affects a lot of people nowadays.

I think that a pushback against the Age of Enlightenment is just. Emotions and our gut feeling are ancient. Emotions and intuition go back to our reptilian brains, humanity’s earliest development. Modern talk-therapy focuses on talking through our feelings about our experiences in life. Feelings do not care about our logic. Social and political issues gain the most attention when they are emotionally based, rather than on vapid chart and statistics. Marketing and sales professionals focus on selling to our emotions, rather than our logic.

However, taken to a certain point, like Werther, only focusing on our feeling’s brushes beyond rationality. If Werther didn’t only consider his emotions, the neo-frontal cortex of his brain would have made more rational sense of his situation.

Fine, he couldn’t have the woman that he obsessed about, because she was already with another man. Ok, it wasn’t’ the end of the world. He could have put those intense feelings elsewhere. Werther was only a young man; he had the rest of his life ahead of him.

In modern times, a young man like Werther could have shifted those feelings elsewhere, such as working out at the gym or go on a dating app and find another woman. In the story, Werther became a legal secretary for a German ambassador, but over time, burying himself into his work still couldn’t relieve him of his obsession of Charlotte.

I suppose there will always be men and women out there like Werther. This is obviously a very unfortunate place to be in in life. Although, there are much better decisions in life than suicide. I would argue that his is the least powerful decision to make.