In the mid-Nineties, the USENET forum Rec.Arts.Books was dominated by hardcore Decon/Pomo people who talked about Theory as the goal toward which all intellectual history had been striving. Among their gods, besides Plato, Derrida, Foucault, and Heidegger, was Friedrich Nietzsche, who was openly bigoted against people having disabilities:
“The invalid is a parasite on society. In a certain state
it is indecent to go on living. To vegetate on ... after
... the right to life has been lost ought to entail the
profound contempt of society.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
- The Twilight of the Idols
"The weak and ill-constituted shall perish, first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so." - Nietzsche, The Antichrist
The academic humanities today still seem to be illiberal. “No platforming” is content-based censorship violating liberal principles of the First Amendment, for example.
In Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, Andre Comte-Sponville finds Nietzsche illiberal:
“Justification of slavery: "Every enhancement of the type 'man' has
so far been the work of an aristocratic society — and it will be so
again and again: a society that believes in the long ladder of an
order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and
that needs slavery in some sense or other." ... Advocacy of
oppression: "The essential characteristic of a good and healthy
aristocracy . . . is that it . . . accepts with a good conscience
the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be
reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to
instruments.”
Nor is it only Nietzsche. Plato discusses five types of regimes (Republic, Book VIII). They are Aristocracy, Timocracy, Oligarchy, Democracy, and Tyranny. Democracy is next to last.
Plato’s illiberalism comes from his concept of reality. The underlying Forms of what we think is real - chairs, tables - are what is truly real. What we can see and touch belongs to the realm of appearances. Because only philosophers can perceive the Forms, Plato said, a Philosopher King should rule. Because the working material of scientists - real physical systems - belongs to the realm of appearances, Plato questioned their validity.
The first academic lived in the first culture to have democracy and science, but was opposed to both, bequeathing a strain of illiberalism whose effects can still be detected in the academic humanities today.
