phil·is·tineDictionary result for philistine
/ˈfiləˌstēn/Submit
noun
1.
a person who is hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts, or who has no understanding of them.
"I am a complete philistine when it comes to paintings"
synonyms: lowbrow, anti-intellectual, materialist, bourgeois; More
adjective
1.
hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts.



“Philistine” is what the Romantics call the person who has given himself over wholly to utility. A Romantic is proud not to be a philistine, yet he senses that when he grows older he can hardly fail to become one. The term “philistine” came from student jargon and in that context referred disparagingly to either a non-student or a former student who was stuck in a normal bourgeois life without the student’s freedoms. For the Romantics, the philistine became the epitome of the average man in general, from whom they wanted to mark themselves off. A philistine is not just someone who values the normal and regular -- the Romantics themselves did that at times -- but rather someone who tries to explain away the wondrous and mysterious and reduce it to the standards of normalcy. The philistine is a person with resentment who takes the extraordinary as ordinary and belittles the sublime. It is a matter, then of people who forbid themselves wonder and astonishment. There is a circumference of comfortable habits “within which they forever turn.” They not only lack imagination themselves, but take as suspect someone they think has too much of it. They only want to “trot along in the same worn track.” They always go the middle way. Romantics too need a middle, but, as Friedrich Shelegel expressed it, it is not the philistine middle “that one never leaves,” but the “true middle” that one takes with him on the “eccentric path of energy and enthusiasm.” ~ Page 130