As a starting point, we can define philosophy as

 

a way of thinking that seeks awareness about the primary elements of thought.

 

Let’s try to understand this definition by examining what it says.

Philosophy is “a way of thinking”.

From the beginning of their existence, man has always tried to reflect; we can notice some rudimentary forms of reflection even in animals. Let’s consider, for example, the difference in the behavior between a few weeks old doggy and an adult dog: the doggy tends to react to situations with a faster impulsiveness, which leads him to a number of failures; the adult dog, instead, is able to observe more slowly the habits of his prey and to adapt to them, in order to have more success in the attempt to capture it; these elements are, obviously, rather difficult to verify, so that we cannot tell for sure if the adult dog’s behaviour is really “reflection”; however, our purpose here is not to study in depth the behavior of animals, but to try to realize that reflection is not a mysterious and supernatural miracle that happens exclusively in the human mind, but a set of elementary electrical impulses, whose simplest forms can be found in animals as well, or even, due to the fact of being precisely electrical impulses, in any nature’s phenomenon and in inanimate objects. We may even think, as an example, of the switching on of a light bulb. Many ways of thinking have been developed in the history of the world,  philosophy is one of them.

 

The definition that I introduced goes on by saying “that seeks awareness”. “Awareness” means having compared an idea with other ideas; for example, if I compare the idea of “fire” with my memory of a burn that I suffered, I can get the knowledge that the flame causes burns and therefore is dangerous; if I never do this comparison, that is, if I never put in contact the idea of fire with my memory of being burnt, I will repeat burning myself, never figuring out where the problem lies. We humans fall back many times into the same problems as stupids, simply because we did not think about them, we did not put in contact our ideas, our memories with each other, so that we didn’t get awareness! We can consider, for example, for how many thousands of years many governors have continued to deceive people, by promising to solve their problems, and people have gone back regularly to damage themselves, despite considering themselves intelligent.

 

Finally, my definition ends by saying: “about the primary elements of thought”. Awareness can be searched with regard to many things; one can also spend a lifetime trying to become increasingly aware of the best ways to earn more money; at some point the following question could rise: is it worth to spend all life trying to find out just this? Are there more important things, that would deserve more this spending of time and reflection, or are all things equally important? What might be the most important things? And what criteria can we use to determine this? And what faith can we have in these criteria? How will we know that they guided us really to the most important things? This kind of questions can be found in the cultures of all peoples, but they began to have a strongly systematic, methodic and critical examination especially in ancient Greece and then in the European culture; in other peoples they rather took the way of religious faith or models of meditation; the difference between meditation and reflection can be found in the fact that a meditator focuses on a few ideas and lives them, tastes them, goes into them with a lifestyle; those who reflect, instead, work on a greater number of ideas and make them interact with greater dynamism. Both ways have advantages and disadvantages. Meditators have a better way in discovering the taste of a few ideas and pause longer, even for millennia, over them, but they cover a more limited extent of the road; those who reflect cover a lot more road, but they deprive themselves of the opportunity to deepen to the utmost the flavor, the beauty, the intimate connections of every single thought, similar to those who run and cannot contemplate so much the beauty of a landscape and experience the deep emotions it can excite.