Without being a science, a religion or the life, the philosophy is essential to those.
This paradoxical relation testifies to its originality that the etymological significance of the word summarizes well
"philosophy"as the love of wisdom.
To be wise, it is to know how to fight against ignorance.
To be wise, it is also to control its passions:
not to let itself go to the tyrannical selfishness which brings back to him while being put in anger vis-a-vis the obstacles of the existence.
When a man has suddenly known and control itself, it makes emerge the deep man that there is in him, i.e. the delivered man of ignorance and violence.
However, wisdom does not stop here. Because the love term that we find in the philosophy, shows that knowledge, and the control of which it makes proof, are particular: they are characterized by the absence of claim in the knowledge.

The wisdom of the love

Being a question of the knowledge, it is essential to be vigilant.
Because if to want to know is a virtue compared to the idleness,
to say "I know" is an act of claim blocking the progress of the knowledge.
Conscious of this phenomenon, Socrate (470-399 before. J.-C..) recalled that the wise is the person who lives by thinking that it has everything to learn: he will say: "the only thing that I know, it is that I do not know anything".
After him, thinkers of the Rebirth like Nicolas de Cues (1401-1464) were made the defenders of a "learned ignorance".
Today, when they speak about their work, the scientists acknowledge easily that the more they advance the less they know, as there is so much to discover.
Being in control, it is still essential to be vigilant. Because if this is a virtue vis-a-vis the relaxation, the total absence of passion, i.e. the indifference, is the concern of violence.
Plato (428-348 before J.-C.), in the Republic, took care to recall that the self-control means harmony with oneself and not dictatorship on oneself.
As for Spinoza (1 632-1677), he devoted all his Ethic to show that no one is virtuous when we killed in ourself any passion.
On the other hand, each time we are happy, we are able to have the control of the passions. Because the frustrated person always nourishes impure thoughts, whereas the happy man, being filled, does not have any of it.

Neither pure wisdom because it is love, nor pure love because it is wisdom, the philosophy is a manner of being held in wisdom by liking. Why is it thus?

Because, as recalled by Schopenhauer (1788-1860), the life wanting the life, this one do not cease being a desire reflecting itself.

Also can one meet it only while being, with his image, a desire reflecting himself more and more, without claim or closing. So to philosophize, it is nothing different than to live and, while living, discovering that the life is full with philosophy.
It is what Plato wanted to say, in the IVe century before J.-C.., at the beginnings of philosophy, when it showed that the ideas model the reality.

At the XIXe century, it is what Hegel (1770-1831) took again by saying that in fact the ideas carry out the world.
Both agreed on the fact that philosophy consists in living with the thought, while pointing out the importance of this one because the reality is full of thought.