philistinism
1
9.9
- noun
- /ˌfɪlɪsˈtɪnɪzəm/
:
filistinismo
- "Call it racism and philistinism, if you must," DeVoto warns the "best minds" of the Eastern intellectual establishment, "but sybilline women and rapt men from megalopolis have been unable to persuade me that neolithic culture was anything but neolithic culture."
And, and now that's a term that we don't typically use these days, philistinism.
- And, and now that's a term that we don't typically use these days, philistinism.
Examples
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It courts philistinism to say that Celan's best poem, "Todesfuge," is also his most accessible, but there is no way around the risk.
Academic text (2007) -
The company's emphasis on profits over artistic expression reflects a troubling trend toward philistinism in the arts.
-
If it were not for that excuse, the student could be accused of hypocrisy and philistinism.
Academic text (1990) -
We are middle-class, but have been spared the more obvious expressions of philistinism of the middle class.
Academic text (1996) -
We have reported over and again about the tide of political philistinism that is threatening to inundate a millennium of culture in the Netherlands.
Blog text (8) -
He spoke of "the new wave of philistinism with which we are threatened by these sour young people who are coming off the assembly line in their hundreds every year and finding employment as critics, even as poets and novelists."
Academic text (1996) -
We should not sentimentalize cultural populism or philistinism, except to say that it is not they, but their supposed intellectual betters, whose habits of mind are the more destructive.
Academic text (1994) -
Of course, in taking Wilde as a messenger for Walker's ideas, I risk characterizing this movement as a reaction against Philistinism and its apparent distaste for beauty, grace, and non-instrumentality.
Academic text (2017) -
But for her to suggest that we are not truly engaging with such work, but are dishonest in this because we fear censure for our philistinism—well, again, this is bad faith, a critical strategy of muck and slime.
Blog text (32) -
They were, as Bellow reproachfully put it elsewhere, "boorish" and plagued by the "violent dulling disease of bourgeois philistinism." (Gray et al., 13-14)
Academic text (1995)
Synonyms
19
5.8
Valuing money and things more than moral or spiritual life
Putting money and things above other values
A way of thinking that does not value art or books
Antonyms
How Materialistic
Surface Forms
Morphology
philistinism = philistine (transparent) = philistine + ism
A regular nominalization from 'philistine' with '-ism' meaning the attitude or doctrine of being philistine, so the sense is directly derived.
Etymology
The word philistinism comes from Philistine, the name of a people in the Bible, and later German students used philistine to mean someone 'not interested in the arts'. So philistinism describes an attitude that values money and things more than art or moral and spiritual ideas.