History
In the original German usage, university students applied the term philister (philistine) to describe a person who was not trained at university; in the social context, the term identified the man (Philister) and the woman (Philisterin) who was not of the university social set. In English, as a descriptor of anti-intellectualism, philistine — a person deficient in the culture of the Liberal Arts — was common British usage by the decade of 1820, which described the bourgeois, merchant middle class of the Victorian Era (1837–1901), whose wealth rendered them indifferent to culture.
In discussing the German poet Heinrich Heine, in the book Essays in Criticism (1865), Matthew Arnold (1822–88), said that:
Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the children of the light’, whom he further described and defined as ‘the people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich . . . are just the very people whom we call the Philistines.Read more about this topic: Philistinism
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“It is true that this man was nothing but an elemental force in motion, directed and rendered more effective by extreme cunning and by a relentless tactical clairvoyance .... Hitler was history in its purest form.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)