I remember a time when I would hear a band and then want to hear everything that sounded like it; I wanted it to feel like I was tapping into a thing, even if it wasn't.
But like infection is the petty thought: it creeps and hides, and wants to be nowhere--until the whole body is decayed and withered by the petty infection... Thus spoke Zarathustra.
You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.