 The Symposium and the Phaedrus are two dialogues that focus on the individual soul and pay no attention to communal life at all. Instead, they concentrate on self-preservation, self-improvement, and self-completion. The Symposium is often treated as a dialogue that predates the Republic, most of all because it mentions neither the immortality nor the tripartition of the soul. But its dramatic staging – the praise of Eros by a company of symposiasts – is not germane to the otherworldly and ascetic tendencies of the Gorgias and the Phaedo. In addition, Plato has good reasons for leaving aside a discussion of the separation of the soul’s faculties in the Symposium, because he aims to show that love is an incentive, not only for all humans, but also for other living beings. Contrary to all other speakers, Socrates denies that Eros is a god, because the gods are in a state of perfection. Love, by contrast, is a desire of the needy for the beautiful and the good (199c–201c). Socrates thereby corrects the previous speakers’ confusion of love with the beloved object. This insight is presented not as Socrates’ own, but as the upshot of a ‘lecture on the nature of love by the wise Diotima’ (201d–212b): Eros is a powerful demon, a being between the mortal and the immortal, an eternally needy hunter of the beautiful. Human beings share that demonic condition; for they are neither good nor bad, but desire the good and the beautiful, the possession of which would constitute happiness for them. Because all people want happiness, they pursue the good as well as they can (205a–206b). In each case they desire the particular kinds of objects that they hope will fulfill their needs. Such fulfillment is not a passive possession; it is rather the objects of love are deemed to be essential in the struggle for self-preservation, self-completion, and self-fulfillment (207d): “For among animals the principle is the same as with us, and mortal nature seeks so far as possible to live forever and be immortal. And this is possible in one way only: by reproduction, because it leaves behind a new young one in place of the old.” There is, then, a constant need for self-restoration and self-improvement by procreation in the quest for earthly immortality. In the case of human beings this need expresses itself in different ways. The search for ‘self-eternalization’ may result in, or even be fulfilled by, the production of biological children or of so-called ‘children of the mind’ (e.g. works of the arts), or even by the creation of order in cities that are then guided by the virtues of justice and moderation (209a–e). Diotima’s lecture is finally crowned by a depiction of the famous scala amoris – Diotima’s explanation of the refinement and sublimation that a person experiences when recognizing higher and higher kinds of beauty (210a–212a). Starting with the love of one beautiful body, the individual gradually learns to appreciate not only all physical beauty, but also the beauty of the mind, and in the end she gets a glimpse of the supreme kind of beauty, namely the Form of the Beautiful itself – a beauty that is neither relative, nor changeable, nor a matter of degree.