Παρένθεση (;):
Έχω μπροστά μου το "Culture and anarchy" του Arnold. Στα περιεχόμενα:
Chapter III
Barbarians, Philistines, Populace
Chapter IV
Hebraism and Hellenism
p. 101
the term Philistine conveys a sense which makes it more peculiarly appropriate to our middle class than to our aristocratic. For Philistine gives the notion of something particularly stiff-necked and perverse in the resistance to light and its children.
Nαι, δεν χρειάζεται, βέβαια, να το έχεις μπροστά σου. Υπάρχει στο διαδίκτυο (ολόκληρο και από διάφορους ιστότοπους).
Κάνει ενδιαφέρουσα χρήση του όρου. Με πολλαπλά νοήματα. Επίσης, κάνει ενδιαφέρουσα χρήση του όρου «middle class» -και, βέβαια, για την εποχή του το «middle-class education» (γιατί αυτό τον ενδιαφέρει κυρίως, όπως και το πού οδηγεί η εν λόγω παιδεία) έχει -εντελώς- διαφορετική σημασία απ'ό,τι θα είχε σήμερα.
Ενδεικτικά (αν και παρέθεσα τον ορισμό τον (ακραίο ορισμό) του «Populace» από την αρχή για να μην αναλωθούμε σε σημειολογία -ιδιαίτερα μια και παίζει και το «Hebraising» in there):
For anyone can perceive how this honouring of a false ideal, not of intelligence and strenuous virtue, but of wealth and station, pleasure and ease, is as a stone from a sling to kill in our great middle-class, in us who are called Philistines, the desire before spoken of, which by nature for ever carries all men towards that which is lovely; and to leave instead of it only a blind deteriorating pursuit, for ourselves also, of the false ideal. And in those among us Philistines whom the desire does not wholly abandon, yet, having no excellent ideal set forth to nourish and to steady it, it meets with that natural bent for the bathos which together with this desire itself is implanted at birth in the breast of man, and is by that force twisted awry, and borne at random hither and thither, and at last flung upon those grotesque and hideous forms of popular religion which the more respectable part among us Philistines mistake for the true goal of man's desire after all that is lovely. And for the Populace this false idea is a stone which kills the desire before it can even arise; so impossible and unattainable for them do the conditions of that which is lovely appear according to this ideal to be made, so necessary to the reaching of them by the few seems the falling short of them by the many. So that, perhaps, of the actual vulgarity of our Philistines and brutality of our Populace, the Barbarians and their feudal habits of succession, enduring out of their due time and place, are involuntarily the cause in a great degree; and they hurt the welfare of the rest of the community at the same time that, as we have seen, they hurt their own.
[...]
All these discoveries are favourable to liberty, and in this way is satisfied that double craving so characteristic of our Philistine, and so eminently exemplified in that crowned Philistine, Henry the Eighth,--the craving for forbidden fruit and the craving for legality.
...and more importantly:
And,--to keep to our point of the influence of religious establishments upon culture and a high development of our humanity,--we can surely see reasons why, with all her energy and fine gifts, America does not show more of this development, or more promise of this. In the following essay it will be seen how our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly. This leaves the Philistines for the great bulk of the nation;--a livelier sort of Philistine than ours, and with the pressure and false ideal of our Barbarians taken away, but left all the more to himself and to have his full swing. And as we have found that the strongest and most vital part of English Philistinism was the Puritan and Hebraising middle-class, and that its Hebraising keeps it from culture and totality, so it is notorious that the people of the United States issues from this class, and reproduces its tendencies,--its narrow conception of man's spiritual range and of his one thing needful. From Maine to Florida, and back again, all America Hebraises. Difficult as it is to speak of a people merely from what one reads, yet that, I think, one may without much fear of contradiction say. I mean, when in the United States any spiritual side in man is wakened to activity, it is generally the religious side, and the religious side in a narrow way. Social reformers go to Moses or St. Paul for their doctrines, and have no notion there is anywhere else to go to; earnest young men at schools and universities, instead of conceiving salvation as a harmonious perfection only to be won by unreservedly cultivating many sides in us, conceive of it in the old Puritan fashion, and fling themselves ardently upon it in the old, false ways of this fashion, which we know so well, and such as Mr. Hammond, the American revivalist, has lately at Mr. Spurgeon's Tabernacle been refreshing our memory with.
[...]
Now, even if this were true, it would still have been better for a man, during the last eighteen hundred years, to have been a Christian and a member of one of the great Christian communions, than to have been a Jew or a Socinian; because the being in contact with the main stream of human life is of more moment for a man's total spiritual growth, and for his bringing to perfection the gifts committed to him, which is his business on earth, than any speculative opinion which he may hold or think he holds. Luther,--whom we have called a Philistine of genius, and who, because he was a Philistine, had a coarseness and lack of spiritual delicacy which have harmed his disciples, but who, because he was a genius, had splendid flashes of spiritual insight,--Luther says admirably in his Commentary on the Book of Daniel: 'A God is simply that whereon the human heart rests with trust, faith, hope, and love. If the resting is right, then the God too is right; if the resting is wrong, then the God too is illusory.' In other words, the worth of what a man thinks about God and the objects of religion depends on what the man is; and what the man is, depends upon his having more or less reached the measure of a perfect and total man.
Kαι από το πρώτο κεφάλαιο:
This is admirable; and, indeed, the Greek word ευφυία, a finely tempered nature, gives exactly the notion of perfection as culture brings us to conceive it: a harmonious perfection, a perfection in which the characters of beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites 'the two noblest of things,'--as Swift, who of one of the two, at any rate, had himself all too little, most happily calls them in his Battle of the Books,--'the two noblest of things, sweetness and light.'
The ευφυής is the man who tends towards sweetness and light; the αφυής, on the other hand, is our Philistine. The immense spiritual significance of the Greeks is due to their having been inspired with this central and happy idea of the essential character of human perfection; and Mr. Bright's misconception of culture, as a smattering of Greek and Latin, comes itself, after all, from this wonderful significance of the Greeks having affected the very machinery of our education, and is in itself a kind of homage to it. http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/nonfiction_u/arnoldm_ca/ca_ch1.htmlEπίσης, μια και αναφέρθηκε ο Νίκος (Σ.) σε μεταφράσεις, να και δύο πρωτότυπα -το ένα του Δαφέρμου (Δαφερμάκης), μια και δεν νομίζω να πρόκειται για συνωνυμία -2-):
1.
Αυτή όμως είναι μία συζήτηση για τα μέτρα των σχολαστικών φιλισταίων, ή για εκείνους που στην πολιτική ασκούν το επάγγελμα του νυχτοφύλακα των εργαζομένων.
Όμως φιλισταίοι και νυχτοφύλακες κρύβουν με επιμέλεια τα ακόλουθα κεφαλαιώδη ζητήματα.
1. Και ο Λένιν και ο Μάρτωφ είναι σύμφωνοι στην συγκρότηση ενός ιεραρχικού, κάθετα οργανωμένου γραφειοκρατικού κόμματος.
[...]
http://www.theseis.com/1-75/theseis/t39/t39f/olenin.htm2. Ο εκφυλισμός του πρώτου τύπου διανόησης εκφράζεται στην μορφή του σχολαστικού επιστήμονα, του αυτάρεσκου «φιλισταίου της επιστήμης». Η θεωρία δογματοποιείται, η κριτική σκέψη εξαλείφεται και εκπίπτει η ειλικρινής αναζήτηση της ουσίας των πραγμάτων. Κυρίαρχη γίνεται η επαναληπτική, μη δημιουργική μορφή εργασίας, το άγονο αναμάσημα παρωχημένων γνώσεων. Ο Γκαίτε περιγράφει με γλαφυρότητα το χαρακτήρα της πνευματικής παραγωγής αυτού του τύπου διανόησης: «Το να με τ' άλλο εσείς κολλάτε, μαγειρεύετε από των άλλων τα αποφάγια ένα φαΐ, της στάχτης το σωρό ανασκαλεύετε μια φλόγα εκείθε κακορίζικη να βγει»[45]. Η σχολαστική ενασχόληση με την επιστήμη αποτελεί μορφή παρασιτισμού στο υγιές σώμα της συσσωρευμένης και αναπτυσσόμενης γνώσης. Αυτός ο τύπος επιστήμονα διανοητικά «σιτίζεται» με τα υποπροϊόντα της σκέψης των μεγαλοφυών ερευνητών του παρελθόντος. Φαντάζεται τον εαυτό του ως γίγαντα, ενώ στην πραγματικότητα είναι νάνος που στέκεται στις πλάτες γιγάντων, ποδοπατώντας τους ή εξευμενίζοντας τους ως αβλαβείς εικόνες.
http://www.ilhs.tuc.gr/gr/Inteligentsia.htm