63: Chapter 64 This chapter replaces meaningless textDerrida's philosophical career began with a critique of Husserl's philosophy of the "self." Husserl argued that language is a phenomenon of consciousness, that linguistic symbols are fundamentally different from natural signs, and that the meaning of linguistic symbols lies in expressing intention.Derrida argues that Husserl "believed in a pre-expressive and pre-linguistic level of meaning, and that what this level reveals" is that within the phenomenologically reduced consciousness, "expression is a process of internalization," and meaning is "the solitary life of the soul," or the "monologue" of the self.Phenomenological reduction entails this view of language: "The first advantage of this inner monologue reduction is that the corporeal activity of language is indeed absent during the monologue." Only the intangible symbol is present, and the word, as a tangible linguistic symbol, "is only a word when our attention is directed solely to the sensible, to the simple sound that constitutes the word." In other words, the symbol that expresses meaning is primarily a sound (from "monologue" to speech), and words are merely symbols that repeatedly record speech."The identity of the word is an ideal repetition, the ideal possibility of repetition." Derrida sees in Husserl a tradition in Western philosophy dating back to Plato: "phonocentrism." According to this view, language is divided into phonetic symbols and written symbols.Phonetic symbols are activated by the mind and given meaning, while written symbols are merely inanimate, arbitrary, and dispensable substitutes for phonetic symbols.
"Phonocentrism" is not only a Western view of language, it is also a philosophical tradition of "logocentrism." The connection between the two lies in this foresight:
The essence of speech "is connected with 'meaning' in 'thought' as logos, creating meaning, accepting meaning, expressing meaning, and harvesting meaning." "Logos" refers to the inherent rationality of language, as well as the rationality of humanity and nature.The binary opposition between speech and writing has evolved in the history of philosophy into binary oppositions such as spirit and matter, rationality and sensibility, self-determination and in-itself, subject and object, mind and body, inside and outside, essence and phenomenon, truth and illusion, nature and culture, logic and rhetoric, and so on.However, the purpose of opposition is unity.In these pairs, the former always occupies a priority and central position, while the latter supplements and serves as a supplement to the former, occupying a marginal position.
Derrida argues that "logocentrism, the metaphysics of phonetic writing (i.e., alphabetic writing).from Socrates to Heidegger, has always assumed that truth in general derives from logos: the history of truth, the history of truths of truths.has always been the corruption of writing and its repression outside of 'adequate' speech." Philosophy is a logocentric way of thinking, applicable only to Western history that used alphabetic writing.When it "imposes itself on the contemporary world and dominates the same order, it is essentially nothing more than the most primitive and intense ethnocentrism."
Derrida repeatedly uses Chinese as an example to attack logocentrism, stating, for example, that "the Chinese model has clearly broken with logocentrism" and that Western philosophers' "Chinese bias" and "hieroglyphic bias" "lead to a state of bewilderment." The opposition between Chinese and Western phonetic scripts is the opposition between two different ways of thinking.During his visit to China in 2000, Derrida said, "China has no philosophy, only thought."
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