Philistinism

In the fields of philosophy and of aesthetics, the term philistinism describes the attitudes, habits, and characteristics of a person who deprecates art, beauty, spirituality, and intellect.

[1] As a derogatory term, philistine describes a person who is narrow-minded and hostile to the life of the mind, whose materialistic and wealth-oriented worldview and tastes indicate an indifference to cultural and aesthetic values.

[2] The contemporary meaning of philistine derives from Matthew Arnold's adaptation to English of the German word Philister, as applied by university students in their antagonistic relations with the townspeople of Jena, early modern Germany, where a riot resulted in several deaths in 1689.

Preaching about the riot, Georg Heinrich Götze, the ecclesiastical superintendent, applied the word Philister in his sermon analysing the social class hostilities between students and townspeople.

[7] Whilst involved in a lawsuit, the writer and poet Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), in the slang of his time, described a gruff bailiff as a philistine, someone who is considered a merciless enemy.

A hollow gut, full of fear and hope that God will have mercy!Goethe described such men and women, by noting that: The Philistine not only ignores all conditions of life which are not his own, but also demands that the rest of mankind should fashion its mode of existence after his own.

[8]In the comedy of manners play, The Rivals (1775), Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816) identifies a violent aristocrat as 'that bloodthirsty Philistine, Sir Lucius O'Trigger'.

He also used it in Sartor Resartus (1833–34) and in The Life of John Sterling (1851), remembering conversations where "Philistines would enter, what we call bores, dullards, Children of Darkness".

The British poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold adapted the German word Philister to English as the word philistine to denote anti-intellectualism .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe described the philistine personality. ( Goethe in the Roman Campagna , 1786, by J. H. W. Tischbein )
The novelist Ödön von Horváth chronicled the coarseness of affect that limited the worldview of the bourgeoisie . (ca. 1919)
Vladimir Nabokov described the natures of philistinism and of the philistine. (1973)