Individualism of Love

Simmel's spectrum from love-by-type to love-by-individuality — anchored in the contrast between Goethe's two cardinal couples: Faust/Gretchen (love by type; replaceability remains possible in principle) and Eduard/Ottilie (in Wahlverwandtschaften: absolute love; replaceability a priori excluded). The structural-formal criterion is replaceability: the more the beloved can in principle be substituted (because what is loved is a type the beloved exemplifies), the further from the limit of individualism; the more replaceability is a priori impossible (because what is loved is the irreducible particular), the closer to absolute love. Simmel articulates: "Eduard and Ottilie love one another because it is written in the stars. Faust and Gretchen love one another only because they have met" (Oakes p. 198). The chapter is the structural-philosophical articulation of what conventional love-talk calls the irreplaceability of the beloved.

Key Points

Replaceability as structural-formal criterion: the more the beloved is exchangeable in principle for another of the same type, the less individualism in the love.
Faust/Gretchen as type-love: Gretchen loves "the spiritual, utterly towering and domineering man" — a type Faust exemplifies; Faust sees Gretchen as genus plus differentia specifica. Replaceability remains possible in principle.
Eduard/Ottilie as absolute love: in Wahlverwandtschaften, the love is "exhaustively determined by the fate of individuality"; replaceability a priori excluded.
Two paradigm dicta: "Eduard and Ottilie love one another because it is written in the stars. Faust and Gretchen love one another only because they have met."
Absolute love (limit of individualism): (i) elimination of everything concerning the species, (ii) a priori exclusion of any replaceability of the individual — "only two expressions of exactly the same attitude" (p. 200).
Distinct from a posteriori exclusiveness: after a choice is made, no other person becomes relevant — that exclusiveness holds only for the future. Absolute love's exclusiveness "ideally holds for the past as well."
The "transcendent presentiments" differ: Gretchen reappears as penitent → "eternally feminine" (transindividual); Eduard/Ottilie's future is the "heartfelt moment when someday they will awaken together" (purely individual union).
Goethe's later transcendent depth of Faust/Gretchen (the Bergschluchten scene) does not redeem the relationship's non-individual core; it confirms it.

Details

The Replaceability Criterion

The structural-formal mark of love-individuation is replaceability. Simmel articulates: in isolated sensuality (autonomous sensual pleasure as end in itself), "the object of which can in principle be replaced by any object at all. Since replaceability always has the character of a means, this object is also disclosed as nothing more than the mere means for the realization of a solipsistic purpose" (Oakes p. 207). The more replaceable the object, the more it functions as means; the more irreplaceable, the more it functions as end-in-itself.

The same criterion graduates within love itself:

Type-love: the beloved is loved as exemplar of a type (the spiritual man, the beautiful woman, the noble character). The same type could in principle be exemplified by another person, and the same love could in principle attach to that other.
Absolute love: the beloved is loved as this particular individual. No other person could exemplify what is loved, because what is loved is the irreducible particularity itself.

Simmel's claim is that these are not two empirical sub-types of love but the two ends of a structural axis on which all loves are located.

Faust and Gretchen — Type-Love Paradigm

"For Faust, Gretchen is first of all just a girl, an exemplar of Everywoman, for Faust is determined to see Helen in every woman. Moreover, Gretchen is a girl endowed with the qualities of Everywoman intensified to the extent that the threshold of erotic excitement is crossed: genus plus differentia specifica." (Oakes p. 198)

Simmel's reading is provocative because it inverts the conventional cultural ranking of Faust as the paradigm of romantic love. The structural reading:

Faust as type-lover: Faust is "determined to see Helen in every woman." He does not love Gretchen as Gretchen-the-individual; he loves a type that Gretchen exemplifies (Helen-the-feminine-ideal).
Gretchen as type-lover too: Gretchen does not love Faust's unique personality. "She certainly does not love Faust as a personality, but rather as the spiritual, utterly towering and domineering man. It is one of thousands of relationships in which a girl of noble character and an inferior level of culture is filled with a diffuse, perhaps unconscious yearning for a more sublime world..." (Oakes p. 194)
Goethe's later transcendent depth: Goethe later places Gretchen in the Bergschluchten / "Mountain Gorges" scene of Faust II where Gretchen reappears among the penitents and the Ewig-Weibliche ("eternally feminine") draws Faust upward. Simmel reads this as confirming not redeeming the relationship's non-individual core: "the real force of the reappearance of Gretchen lies in the eternally feminine: in other words the timeless and purely trans-individual feminine. But this final elevation of the relationship... is only the metaphysical sublimation of its nature as a thoroughly general entity" (p. 197).

The implication: Faust is not the paradigm of love-as-such. It is the paradigm of one mode of love — type-love — and a relatively impoverished mode at that.

Eduard and Ottilie — Absolute Love Paradigm

In Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities, 1809), Eduard's love for Ottilie is Simmel's contrasting paradigm:

"Eduard's passion, on the other hand, is focused on Otilie's absolute individuality, which is, of course, thoroughly feminine. But in it that ideal line of demarcation is completely erased, with the result that it becomes impossible to link this passion to any other specific type of passion, perhaps through the basis of the general as a medium. Eduard and Otilie love one another because it is written in the stars. Faust and Gretchen love one another only because they have met." (Oakes p. 198)

The two paradigm-dicta:

"It is written in the stars" — Eduard/Ottilie's love is predestined in the sense that no contingency could have produced the same love with a different person. The "a priori" structure is metaphysical, not chronological.
"Only because they have met" — Faust/Gretchen's love is wholly contingent: had they not met, this love would not have arisen, but the same Faust would have loved any sufficiently elevated young woman.

Goethe's title Wahlverwandtschaften (elective affinities) is itself the chemical-philosophical metaphor: certain elements have elective affinity for each other — they prefer one specific other element. The novel uses the chemical metaphor to articulate exactly what Simmel calls absolute love: this individual is for that individual in a structural way that no chemical reaction-of-types can describe.

Simmel notes that the other pair in the novel (Charlotte and the Captain) instantiate the same elective-affinity structure but to a more limited degree. "[T]he types of love, which in essence are unconditionally distinct from one another, always leave space for the most diversified gradations" (p. 199).

Absolute Love — the Limit Definition

Simmel's formal definition:

"Thus I believe I may designate as absolute that love in which the elimination of everything concerning the species and the a priori exclusion of any replaceability of the individual are only two expressions of exactly the same attitude. In this case, the pure concept of love, the extension of one subject to the other which is wrenched from every aspect of the life of the species and remains completely within the subject as a thoroughly individual feeling, achieves its rare and consummate realization." (Oakes p. 200)

Two coextensive features:

Elimination of species-concerns: the species-related dimensions (sexual differentiation, drive, procreation, biological fitness) remain present but as objective facts indifferent to the love's meaning. Not excluded, but rendered non-operative as motives.
A priori exclusion of replaceability: no possible other person could be the beloved. This holds not just chronologically (after the choice, no other choice) but structurally (the love would not have arisen for any other person).

Simmel insists these two features are not two separate conditions but "only two expressions of exactly the same attitude." The same disposition that excludes species-concerns also excludes replaceability — they are facets of one structural orientation.

A Priori vs. A Posteriori Exclusiveness

Simmel distinguishes absolute love from a structurally similar but philosophically distinct phenomenon — a posteriori exclusiveness:

"Therefore I can describe as an a priori only the certainty with which it places every mistaken conflation beyond discussion. It should not be confused with those cases in which, after the choice is made and the possible relationship to the entire sex is concentrated on a single individual, there can no longer be any question of another person. This is an a posteriori exclusiveness. It holds true for the future. In the case of absolute love, however, exclusiveness ideally holds for the past as well. There are marvelous cases of love that completely exhibit the phenomenon of the absolute. In the sense of an a posteriori exclusiveness, however, they are only empirical. They are related to the absolute in the same way that the infinity of time is related to atemporality. It could be said that practically there is no difference between them either." (Oakes p. 201)

Three philosophical features of the distinction:

The a priori / a posteriori difference is structural, not temporal. A posteriori exclusiveness is the result of prior choice: once I have chosen this beloved, no other can be relevant. A priori exclusiveness is structural: no other could have been the beloved, even in the absence of any choice.
The "infinity of time vs. atemporality" analogy: absolute love is to a posteriori exclusiveness as atemporality is to the infinity of time. Time can extend infinitely without thereby being atemporal; analogously, a posteriori exclusiveness can extend over a whole life without thereby being a priori.
Practically indistinguishable. Simmel concedes: "practically there is no difference between them either." The structural-philosophical difference may not produce different external behavior; the difference is in the meaning of the exclusivity.

The Gendered Articulation (and Its Limits)

Simmel anchors the type-love account of Gretchen in a generalization about women that contemporary readers find tendentious:

"However, that this general image is worthy of the entire intensity of her emotions and the commitment of her entire existence is based on the fact that for women as such, the general — sexual life as a whole, the relationship to children, the activities and emotions that define the sphere of the home and the family — easily becomes a thoroughly individual experience. Because of their ostensibly or actually more profound emotional depths they intensify what the man accepts as something general and typical, to the point that it becomes a matter of purely individual fate and the ultimate focus of the personality." (Oakes p. 195)

The structural claim about individualism-of-love is separable from this anthropological claim about women, but Simmel does not separate them. The argument as Simmel makes it depends on the gendered premise: it is because of women's distinctive intensification of the general into individual that Gretchen's type-love can have the emotional gravity of an individual love.

A contemporary reading must:

Retain the structural account of individualism-of-love (which works without the gendered premise).
Question the anthropological claim (which does not survive feminist critique).
Note the dependence: where Simmel's argument requires the anthropological premise, the structural claim is weakened.

The Threat to Species-Life

Simmel's individualism-of-love thesis connects to a broader thesis about modernity. As love individualizes — drawing meaning from "the total cosmos of the personality" — it positively decouples from biological species-fitness:

"Empirical considerations seem to establish this as a matter of fact. At least in our upper classes, we can observe that the love of women, and to a lesser extent that of men as well, is increasingly tied to the spiritual qualities of the partner and less frequently to the instinct for the partner's biological fitness, even though there is no sense in which this is invariably the case. Beginning insignificantly and thwarted and counteracted in a thousand different ways, one of the most colossal developments imaginable is introduced by this development: Its progress deprives us of our only index of the biological adequacy of acts of procreation, and the love match loses its biological value!" (Oakes p. 209)

The structural argument: in less-individualized populations, instinct can track species-fitness (the love-match is the biological-fitness selector). In highly individualized populations, the very perfection of love-as-such draws love toward spiritual / non-species qualities, defeating the species-fitness function.

This is "one of the most colossal developments imaginable" — a modernity-diagnosis embedded in the individualism-of-love thesis. The modern subject's capacity for absolute love is co-extensive with the modern subject's species-instinctual self-defeat.

Positions

Simmel (On Love (a fragment), pp. 191–209): The individualism of love is a spectrum from type-love (Faust/Gretchen) to absolute love (Eduard/Ottilie), with replaceability as the structural-formal criterion. Absolute love is defined by coextensive elimination of species-concerns + a priori exclusion of replaceability.
The conventional cultural reading of Faust holds it up as the romantic paradigm. Simmel inverts this: Faust's couple is the non-paradigm; Wahlverwandtschaften's couple is the paradigm.
Friedrich Gundolf (Goethe, 1916) and other Goethe scholars contest the cleanliness of the type-love-vs-individual-love division. Gretchen's monologues exhibit more individuated moral consciousness than Simmel's "thousands of relationships" reduction allows.
Feminist critique rejects the anthropological premise that women distinctively individualize the general — the structural account of individualism-of-love is separable from this premise but Simmel argues with it operative.
Schopenhauer (Metaphysics of Sexual Love, 1844 supplement to World as Will, Ch. 44) reads sexual love as the species genius operating through individuals — closer to type-love at the structural level, since the species selects the partner through the individual's apparent preferences. Simmel's absolute love is structurally opposed: love that has fully ascended beyond the species teleology.
Stendhal (De l'amour, 1822) names "crystallization" as the process by which the lover endows the beloved with qualities. Stendhal's crystallization is closer to Simmel's projection-of-qualities account — but Simmel's individualism-of-love operates prior to crystallization, as the categorial structure within which crystallization can or cannot establish irreplaceability.
MP (negative-reality-of-love, reading Proust): love as institution of an irreplaceable hollow. The "Albertine inside me" structure is cousin to Simmel's absolute love — both involve irreplaceability — but MP's analysis is at the institutional-relational level (love as instituted privation) while Simmel's is at the categorial level (love as a priori exclusion of replaceability). Not the same claim: false-friend caution.

Connections

is grounded in love-as-formative-category — individualism-of-love is the mechanism by which the love-category constitutes its beloved as irreplaceable; the absolute love limit is where the categorial purity is total.
is grounded in more-than-life — individualization of love is the mechanism by which love draws meaning from "the total cosmos of the personality" rather than from species-fitness, the central trans-vital structure.
connects to simmel-tragedy-of-love — the more individual the love (the more absolute), the sharper the tragic distance from life-of-species; individualism is what creates the tragic shadow.
paradigm-cited via Goethe: Faust I/II and Die Wahlverwandtschaften.
contrasts with Schopenhauer's metaphysics of sexual love (the species genius through individual preferences).
cousin to negative-reality-of-love — both involve irreplaceability of the beloved, but at different philosophical levels (categorial vs. institutional). False-friend caution.
modernity-thesis: the colossal development by which the love-match decouples from biological fitness — extraction-note Pass 3 Part D candidate absolute-love-as-a-priori-exclusion-of-replaceability, deferred to audit Phase 8.
is the philosophical articulation of the common phrase "the irreplaceability of the beloved."

Open Questions

The anthropological premise about women's distinctive individualization (p. 195) — separable from the structural claim, but Simmel does not separate them. A more rigorous reading would isolate the structural claim from the anthropological argument.
The reading of Faust/Gretchen. Goethe scholars (e.g., Gundolf) would contest Simmel's reduction of Gretchen to "one of thousands of relationships."
Whether absolute love is actual in any empirical case. Simmel implies it is rare: "this rare and consummate realization" (p. 200). The structural definition is consistent with absolute love being a philosophical limit-concept never fully realized.
The relation to crystallization. Stendhal's account of the lover's projection of qualities onto the beloved presupposes a prior selection (the beloved is who gets crystallized). Whether Simmel's a priori exclusion of replaceability operates upstream of crystallization or is itself a species of crystallization is open.
The relation to MP's negative-reality-of-love. Both involve irreplaceability but the registers differ. Whether the two structures can be brought into a single articulation is a candidate research question.
The relation to Levinasian alterity. Absolute love's a priori exclusion of replaceability is structurally close to Levinasian unicité d'autrui but Levinas grounds the unicity in transcendence-of-the-face whereas Simmel grounds it in the lover's categorial constitution of the beloved-as-irreducible. Cross-tradition cousin or false friend?

Sources

simmel-1923-on-love-fragment — primary anchor; cardinal passages: the Faust/Gretchen reading (Oakes pp. 191–198); the Eduard/Ottilie contrast (pp. 198–199); the definition of absolute love (pp. 200–201); the a priori / a posteriori distinction (p. 201); the colossal development on love-match losing biological value (p. 209); the replaceability criterion within sensuality discussion (pp. 207–208). The gendered articulation of women's individualization of the general at p. 195.