  In ethics, the Republic’s main practical lesson is that one should, if one can, pursue wisdom and that if one cannot, one should follow the wisest guides one can find. This lesson is familiar from Plato’s Socratic dialogues: the philosophical life is best, and if one lacks knowledge, one should prefer to learn from an expert. But the Republic characterizes philosophy differently. First, it goes much further than the Socratic dialogues in respecting the power of passions and desires. Wisdom still requires being able to survive Socratic examination (534b–c), but it also explicitly requires careful and extensive habituation of spirited and appetitive attitudes (485a–486b, 519a8–b1), sublimation of psychological energy from spirited and appetitive desires to philosophical desire (cf. 485d), and continued attention to and maintenance of the desires that arise from the non-calculating parts of one’s soul (571d–572b, 589a–b, cf. 416e–417b). Second, as opposed to the Socrates of the Socratic dialogues, who avows ignorance and is content with the belief that the world is well-ordered, the Socrates of the Republic insists that wisdom requires understanding how the world is, which involves apprehending the basic mathematical and teleological structure of things. Third, although the Socrates of the Socratic dialogues practices philosophy instead of living an ordinarily engaged political life, he insists that his life is closer to what the political art demands than the ordinarily engaged life is. According to the Republic, by contrast, the philosopher prefers to be entirely apart from politics, especially in ordinary circumstances (496c–e, 592a, cf. 520a–b).