The Catharsis of the Spirit from Poshlost'

 Recently, a friend gave me a copy of The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity, Volume One: The Doctrine of God by I.A. Il'in, translated and edited by Philip T. Grier. Il'in is of interest in part because he is said to be Putin's favorite philosopher. (After about fifty pages, I wonder to what degree Putin has ever seriously engaged Il'in's work.)

Toward the end of Chapter 1, "The Concrete-Empirical", Il'in writes that

One can accept without question, that if the German language had a word corresponding to the Russian word "poshlost'", Hegel would have called this path the path of the "catharsis of spirit from poshlost'".

I first encountered the term "poshlost" in Nabokov's book on Gogol. My recollection is that he defined it as something like "the pretentiously bad". In the chapter notes, Grier gives adjectival counterparts, and also refers to the essay "Philistines and Philistinism" in Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature. A friend, fluent in Russia, and for some years resident in Russia and the former Soviet republics, says that the word "is actually used very frequently in spoken Russian".

There are many things to be said about the conceptions of the British empiricists, who seem to be the philosophers Il'in had in mind in the chapter. But the notion that they indulged in poshlost' is odd.