It may be surprising that even among philosophers, there is no genuine consensus about what exactly philosophy is, what it should do, and how it should be done. Not only have thinkers of all times and places thought about it differently, but philosophy has meant something different for different peoples since the beginning of time; which is to say, the role it has played in human life has varied greatly. Consider the ancient Greeks for example. Their idea of philosophy as “philosophy,” or the “love of wisdom,” was a pursuit of goodness, virtue, and therefore knowledge of absolute truth. It entailed physical and moral training all throughout one’s life, and was “done” entirely in public—indeed, it was for public life. Philosophy acquired a supreme status and unique utility in civic life and organization. It was essential for democracy and society, and was the way to achieve genuine happiness.
Yet, even among the Greeks, there were significant differences among their views in spite of all that they had in common. Socrates was wary of text and never wrote anything down himself. He was also so sincere about the pursuit of truth and virtue that he willingly drank hemlock poison as a punishment for having committed blasphemy and heresy (more-or-less) because technically it was true that he did these things! Can you imagine accepting a death penalty as a matter of principle?
Socrates’ students, however, felt differently, and it is because they left records of Socrates’ teachings that we know anything about him at all. His disciples, in fact, had greatly differing views. For example, regarding education, Xenophon was content to assume a strict Sparta-like model for the sake of moral discipline, while Plato famously proposed a synthesis of the militaristic Sparta system and the democratic system of Athens in his Republic. The Greek philosophies of education, notably Plato and Aristotle’s, were officially inclusive—in that both boys and girls could receive the same education and pursue the same careers–yet in practice this was never the case. Education was always limited to male citizens in Athens, and among them, only the ones who could afford it. The only exception to this rule were the Epicureans who allowed women, children, slaves, and foreigners to participate in their school. Furthermore, the roles for which higher education was to prepare the youth of Athens—in Plato’s view—were those traditionally performed by men. In other words, hypothetically a woman could do a man’s work in the republic envisioned by Plato, but the conventional work, roles, and values of women and domestic life were of no worth in education.
One further point is that philosophers differentiated themselves from so-called Sophists, who mostly taught rhetoric for a fee. This also hints at how Athenians perceived philosophy and conditions for its practice. And then on top of all this you have the infamous and irreverent Diogenes, masturbating and urinating in public, interrupting Plato’s classes, insulting Alexander the Great, etc.
Around the same time, half the world away, philosophers in China were cultivating a completely different philosophical universe. In China, there was no word for philosophy. What we would consider philosophy today was all understood to be learning (學), or more generally as “the art of life” (later known as gongfu; 工夫). It is not an exaggeration to say that in the context of East Asian civilization, “philosophy” was virtually synonymous with the concept of “culture” (文). With the exception of the Legalists(法家) and The Mohists(墨家), the rules of formal logic and formalistic rhetoric never factored significantly into their views of life and wisdom. Also unlike the Greeks, their worldview did not assume the existence of a supernatural “more-real” reality of ideas. Whereas the Greeks had become interested in understanding the principles of nature to manipulate its energies for their own benefit, the Chinese understood themselves as irreducibly a vital part of nature. Their strategy was to accept and tolerate the cycles of nature, be as sensitive to them as possible, and adapt their actions accordingly. The Confucians, for example, developed a ritualized way of life intended to achieve and sustain harmony(和) as broadly as possible. Among them, there were in fact many differences. Confucius(孔子) himself was mostly concerned with dusting of the tried-and-true traditions of the Zhou kingdom(周). He made no metaphysical claims, and spoke almost entirely about mundane self-discipline and cultivation as the concrete realization of moral virtue(德) and enjoyment(樂)—and therefore, the embodiment of ren(仁). For him, “philosophy” was not about laws, semantics, argumentation, definition, etc., but about striving to live as artfully as possible. His disciple Mencius(孟子) developed a moral innatism that claimed humans were inherently good(性善說)—a position which was famously refuted by Xunzi(荀子) who believed the opposite, that humans are inherently bad(性惡說). And then you have you “Daoists” like Zhuangzi(將子), who deny all such claims about human nature and the codification of rituals(禮法) to achieve harmony, instead writing stylistically peculiar and even irreverent writings to get people to experience the world beyond their ideas of it.
Such differences are, of course, not exclusive to ancient times. Martin Heidegger, for example, has been famously criticized and even rejected as a philosopher entirely by many analytic philosophers who consider his works to be mostly nonsensical. Consider how such differences appear in the styles of these various thinkers: in the wandering prose of Heidegger, the terse, itemized proofs of Wittgenstein, and the sarcastic and even satirical break-out-in-song style of Zhuangzi.
It is worth noting that for most of history, the identity of philosophy has been rather ambiguous and has evolved significantly. Today we have a tendency to see it as an academic discipline in its own right; something that only concerns professors or college graduates. This is, in fact, a recent historical development. Philosophy became a discrete “discipline” with the advent of modern universities after the industrial revolution—mostly around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Prior to this, its status and its application was much more general. Historically, philosophy was understood as being the liberal art, or, what integrates all of the traditional liberal arts; both the humanities and the sciences. It wasn’t until industrialization and the subsequent departmentalization and specialization of the academy that philosophy became isolated into its own domain.
The identity of philosophy, as this brief introduction suggests, is difficult to pinpoint. Indeed, the existence of so many different philosophies and views about the nature of philosophy suggests that it is not a singular thing in itself—that it can be many even contradictory things because it has and is. In some sense, then, to get a sense of what philosophy is requires delving into its numerous interpretations. Each philosophy will assume and claim different things about the nature of philosophy, and to understand these in a significant way requires that one read through them or interact with them in a meaningful way. This is a task that could take an entire lifetime (or more)!
Rather than attempt to account for the entirety of philosophy from the get-go, it may be helpful to approach the topic in more general terms. When you zoom out and glance at the big picture of all the things philosophy does and means in human experience, across cultures and time periods, we see that what is common among philosophies is an attempt to attain a general view of the world in order to determine what is valuable in it and therefore how to best direct our actions. This sort of anthropological approach helps us to understand why different philosophies developed, and more importantly, what they mean. When we examine the ancient Greeks, for example, we do not wonder whether Athenian civilization was true or false, but we are indeed concerned about its meaning, especially what it means or could mean for us today.
Studying philosophies and appreciating what they mean will always require an interpretation, which is to say that our perception of these meanings will always be culturally situated. Even an interpretation of the cold, hard logic of the likes of Wittgenstein will require having had an experience as a person within a culture. It is through such a frame of reference that those ideas may mean anything in the first place, but this also suggests that their significance, especially concerning our general view of the world, always involves interpretation—or reflection.