Derrida's philosophical career began with a criticism of Husserl's "self" philosophy. Husserl believed that language is a phenomenon of consciousness, that there is a fundamental difference between language symbols and natural marks, and that the meaning of language symbols lies in expressing intentions. Derrida said that Husserl "believed in a pre-expressive and pre-linguistic level of meaning, and believed that what this level reveals is that within the consciousness of phenomenological reduction, "expression is an internalization process", and meaning is "the lonely life of the soul" or the "monologue" of the self. The phenomenological reduction is such a view of language: "The first benefit of this inner monologue reduction is that the physical activity of language is indeed absent during the monologue", and only the intangible symbols are present, while the words as tangible language symbols "are only called words when our attention is directed solely to the sensible, to the words that are composed of simple pronunciations". That is to say, the symbols that express meaning are first of all sounds (from "monologue" to speech), and the text is just a symbol that repeatedly records speech, "the sameness of words is the ideal repetition, it is the ideal possibility of repetition". Derrida saw in Husserl a tradition of Western philosophy that began with Plato - "phonetic centrism". According to this view, language is divided into phonetic symbols and text symbols. Phonetic symbols are activated by the mind and given meaning, while text is only an inanimate, arbitrary, and dispensable substitute for phonetic symbols.

"Phonetic-centrism" is not only a Western view of language, it is also a philosophical tradition of "logo-centrism". The connection between the two lies in such a foresight:

The essence of phonetic symbols "is associated with 'meaning' in the 'thought' as logos, creating meaning, accepting meaning, expressing meaning, and harvesting meaning". "Logos" is the inherent rationality of language, and also the rationality of human beings and nature. The binary opposition between phonetic symbols and text has evolved into a binary opposition of spirit and matter, rationality and sensibility, self-being and freedom, subject and object, mind and body, inside and outside, essence and phenomenon, truth and illusion, nature and culture, logic and rhetoric, etc. by the history of philosophy. But the purpose of opposition is unity. In the above pairs, the former is always in a priority and central position, and the latter is a supplement and service to the former, and is in a marginal position.

Derrida believes that "logocentrism is the metaphysics of phonetic writing (such as pinyin)... From Socrates to Heidegger, it has always been believed that general truth originates from logos: the history of truth, the history of truth of truth... has always been the corruption of writing and the suppression of writing outside of "sufficient" speech." Philosophy is a way of thinking of logocentrism, which is only applicable to Western history that uses pinyin. When it "imposes itself on the world today and dominates the same order, it is basically the most primitive and strongest ethnocentrism." Derrida has repeatedly used Chinese as an example to attack "logocentrism", such as saying that "the Chinese model has obviously broken logocentrism" and that Western philosophers' "Chinese bias" and "hieroglyphic bias" "led to ignorance." The opposition between Chinese and Western pinyin is the opposition between two different ways of thinking. Derrida said during his visit to China in 2000: "China has no philosophy, only thought."

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