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In German classicism, pain and violence are instruments used to obtain harmony and wholeness. For example, Johann Joachim Winckelmann's exemplary dictum for eighteenth-century German classicism, "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur," refers to a violent scene: a marble statue of the Trojan priest Laocoon and his sons under attack by deadly serpents.1 Winckelmann describes the statue:
The pain is revealed in all the muscles and sinews of his body, and we ourselves can almost feel it as we observe the painful contraction of the abdomen alone without regarding the face and other parts of the body. . . . The physical pain and the nobility of soul are distributed with equal strength over the entire body and are, as it were, held in balance with one another. Laocoon suffers, but he suffers like Sophocles' Philoctetes; his pain touches our very souls, but we wish that we could bear misery like this great man.2
For Winckelmann, this representation of pain suggests a balanced soul and motivates viewers to strive for the ability to bear misery with strength and tranquility. Thus, Winckelmann puts pain in the service of a greater ideal; that is, an aesthetic representation of pain should motivate individual development.
The implication here is that pain and violence against the body are integral to the aesthetics and theories of individual development in German classicism. Simon Richter, in Laocoon's Body and the Aesthetics of Pain, analyzes representations of pain during this epoch and demonstrates that "the pain of the body is at the center of the aesthetics of beauty, and that the desires of this aesthetics are responsible for the infliction of the pain it seeks to hide."3 As Richter and other scholars point out, the classical ideal of a whole body relies on the experience of bodily pain and violation at the same time it represses it. Pain and violence are thus instrumental-they are means to an aesthetic and cultural end.
Yet during this era, at least one author-philosopher ultimately rejected this tendency toward the instrumentalization of pain. Friedrich Hölderlin first modeled his ideas of aesthetics and development on Friedrich Schiller's, which, like Winckelmann's, privilege pain in order to further aesthetic and social ideals (embodied in the German concept of education or development, Bildung). Hölderlin, however,...