What is a philistine? A hollow gut, full of fear and hope that God will have mercy! The polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) described the philistine personality, by asking: 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. The denotations and connotations of the terms philistinism and philistine describe people who are hostile to art, culture, and the life of the mind, and, in their stead, favor economic materialism and conspicuous consumption as paramount human activities. Vladimir Nabokov described the natures of philistinism and of the philistine. Culture says: “Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voices look at them attentively observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?” The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the people whom we call the Philistines. If it were not for this purging effect wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole world, the future, as well as the present, would inevitably belong to the Philistines. Now, the use of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery, and not only to say as a matter of words that we regard wealth as but machinery, but really to perceive and feel that it is so. In Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (1869), Matthew Arnold said:
In English usage, the term philistine-a person hostile to aesthetic and intellectual discourse-was common British usage by the decade of 1820, and was applied to the bourgeois, merchant middle class of the Victorian Era (1837–1901), whose new wealth rendered some of them hostile to cultural traditions which favored aristocratic power.
In German usage, university students applied the term Philister (Philistine) to describe a person who was not trained at university in the German social context, the term identified the man ( Philister) and woman ( Philisterin) who was not from the university. 16, Samson vs the Philistines), of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), adopted into the Christian Old Testament. Götze addressed the town-vs-gown matter with an admonishing sermon, "The Philistines Be Upon Thee", drawn from the Book of Judges (Chapt. About the riot, Georg Heinrich Götze, the ecclesiastical superintendent, applied the word Philister in his sermon about the social class hostilities between students and townspeople. 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, Germany, where a row resulted in several deaths, in 1689. As a derogatory term philistine describes a person who is narrow-minded and hostile to the life of the mind, whose materialistic worldview and tastes indicate an indifference to cultural and aesthetic values. In the fields of philosophy and of aesthetics, the term philistinism describes the attitudes, habits, and characteristics of a person who deprecates art and beauty, spirituality and intellect. The British poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold adapted the German word Philister to English as the word philistine to denote anti-intellectualism.