Nature and Philistinism. It has been said that philistinism is undesirable because too naturalistic or insufficiently cultural, and so, up to a point, it is.  But philistinism is not naturalism or the same as being too natural, since ‘the philistine’ is, thanks to inter-axial relationships of a church-hegemonic order, one who is fundamentally against nature even as he occasionally or even often indulges it in what he would regard, again under church-hegemonic pressures stemming from the northeast point of the axial compass, as sinful conduct, sin being consequent upon an acknowledgement, from a male standpoint, of the folly of freely somatic behaviour from a position that is committed, no matter how imperfectly, to the wisdom and, more importantly, grace of metaphysics, wherein psychic freedom has its throne.  Hence ‘the philistine’ is a cut above the merely heathen naturalist, for whom there is no concept of sin because no recognition of an independent cultural principle commensurate with metaphysics at the northeast point of the axial compass.  The heathen is simply naturalistic whereas the philistine is effectively antinatural in his rejection of somatic freedom from a standpoint centred in or, at any rate, theoretically committed to psychic freedom of a metaphysical order.  Philistinism is the precondition, for the catholic masses, of culture, even though, in priestly vein, culture can – and does – exist independently of nature and, hence, of philistinism when it is truly or even approximately metaphysical.  Therefore the church-hegemonic/state-subordinate axis stretching from the southwest to the northeast point of the axial compass provides us with a polarity between philistinism and culture as far as the male distinction between antiphysics and metaphysics is concerned, with a secondary distinction, on both church and state terms, between what can be called pseudo-barbarity and pseudo-civility as far as the female distinction between chemistry and antimetachemistry is concerned, chemistry having less to do with sin or folly than with pseudo-crime and pseudo-evil, antimetachemistry less to do with grace or wisdom than with pseudo-punishment and pseudo-goodness.  But all this is the converse, after all, of state-hegemonic/church-subordinate criteria on the axis which stretches from the northwest to the southeast point of the compass in question, where we have every right to speak of the genuine barbarity and civility of metachemistry and antichemistry on primary state-hegemonic/church-subordinate terms but, by contrast, of the pseudo-philistinism and pseudo-culture of antimetaphysics and physics on secondary state-hegemonic/church-subordinate terms, the former polarity largely female in character and the latter one its male counterpart in what, with pseudo-folly and pseudo-wisdom coupled, in church-subordinate vein, to pseudo-sin and pseudo-grace, is a poor cousin to the church-hegemonic/state-subordinate distinction between antiphysics and metaphysics.  But even here we can speak of a further distinction between pseudo-philistinism, which at least acknowledges the existence and rights of pseudo-culture, and what could be called pseudo-nature in consequence of a rejection of such rights attendant upon a shift in emphasis from state-hegemonic/church-subordinate criteria to state-absolutist totalitarianism.  Such pseudo-nature is not even pseudo-meek but simply the pseudo-heathen male corollary of a more absolutist approach to vanity as an extrapolation less from antimetaphysics than from metachemistry in female-oriented state primacy.  It is the male equivalent of heathenistic naturalism within an axial context that had once been state hegemonic but was now, informally if not formally, state absolutist and hence overly totalitarian