Daily Inspiration Quote by Jacques Derrida

Derrida needles a cultural double standard: philosophy is scolded into plainness, while the sciences are granted a kind of institutional exemption for being opaque. The line works because it’s not a defense of muddiness so much as a diagnosis of who gets to be “difficult” without apology. We tend to treat scientific inaccessibility as the natural cost of precision, specialization, and math; philosophical inaccessibility, by contrast, is framed as a moral failure - elitism, obfuscation, bad faith. Derrida flips the burden of proof: why is philosophy uniquely required to translate itself into everyday prose when science, often far less legible to non-experts, can keep its gates and still claim public legitimacy?

The subtext is classic Derrida: “accessibility” isn’t an innocent ideal but a demand shaped by power. Who is allowed to set the terms of intelligibility? What counts as clear? In many public debates, “clarity” means “familiar vocabulary,” which silently privileges inherited categories and stable meanings - precisely the things Derrida made his career unsettling. If you force philosophy to be instantly digestible, you’re also forcing it to accept the language-games that culture already finds comfortable.

Context matters: Derrida spent decades as the poster child for academic difficulty, routinely caricatured as a pretentious obscurantist while simultaneously reshaping literary studies, law, and political theory. The quip doubles as a media critique: science is often packaged as neutral fact, philosophy as needless complication. Derrida’s punchline suggests the opposite: sometimes complication is the honest form, and “easy” is just an unexamined ideology with better PR.