And as the beloved is here loved not as an individual but as the messenger of a supraindividual beauty, so is the lover himself also deindividualized, because his love, as I indicated, comes not from the creative personality but from his former beholding of the Idea of the beautiful. Both object and subject are only vessels of the Idea. Obviously, love must first be removed from this sphere outside of both of them, every ego must first have found a definite, secure boundary for itself, for love to move on the shortest line between them, as it were, and for love therefore to be able to quiet their yearning only through reciprocal love.

QUESTION: This Platonic schema raises the question of how particular, individual love survives once both parties are mere vessels of the Idea of beauty. Worth exploring whether reciprocal, individual love requires a post-Platonic framework.

XREF: This echoes Plato's Symposium (Diotima's ladder of love) and the Neoplatonic tradition of love as beholding the Form of Beauty.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 583