Being a philosopher can get depressing at times, if I practice philosophy (if I engage in fearless thinking) I have to confront many questions, I have to be ruthless in a critique of all that is. In doing this, I chance becoming disheartened, disillusioned, with the most treasured beliefs of my youth. In grasping for the first time the implications of the death of God, having an intimation of this mighty event, of the transience and futility of all forms of refuge from it, I may become nostalgic for ignorance, this nostalgia is resistance to the palpable impossibility of a return, a retreat. Depression comes as the felt futility of nostalgia.

The good thing for us is that we do not have to persist in such states of spiritual reaction. We can recognize that our nostalgia is merely our slavery to the present order in a sublimated form. Once we have abandoned our illusions, once we have peered into all of those dark forbidden corners and musty monastic cells, after we have choked gasped on the abyss between electrons, we come to a realization. This realization saves us from a life of nihilistic negativism, this realization comes as a qualitative change in the image of thought. The goal of thinking is not to establish a perfect representation of what is. The goal of thinking is not to set up a rational theology that can explain the entire would as what it is, neither is it merely to trope the illusions of the established orders and the traditional narratives. In other words, the goal and nature of thinking is not to establish a constant to which life can be reduced, it is something quite different.

As Sartre said, "human life begins on the other side of despair", we all have that dark night of the soul during which we sense the utter bankruptcy of the lies according to which we regulate our daily lives, but it is all to easy to reject them due to representational inadequacy and switch to another permutation of the same fundaments. This is what we must resist, if we do not resist this impulse, this concupiscence, we doom ourselves to a cycle of illusion and nihilism that leaves us by turns manic and miserable always over or undershooting life, always negating whether by means of accusation or false praise. Once we arrive at the moment of nihilism, there is another track open to us, what we must do at that moment is choose the more difficult path; we must reject the image of thought as representation that underlies our illusions about the nature of reality. We must reject the image of thought according to which its goal is truth defined as a stable analog, or picture of reality conceived as a static 'state of affairs'.

Marx once said, "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." In these words we can see an opposition between two images of thought; the image according to which thought represents reality, always approaching the receding horizon of a perfect model, and the image according to which thought is something creative, something that intervenes in the world and changes it. It is the move from the first to the second that can help us in the moment of nihilism.

Once we arrive at this moment in our lives, we are faced with another temptation namely, a brute empiricism of pure fact in which we make a grand gesture of abandoning cosmic meaning in favor of the controlled discipline of scientific perception. However, under this fashionable world-view, the residue of the representational image of thought remains, the idea of truth as correspondence between static thought and static being remains though in a sort of rhetorical camouflage. In order to affirm this position, we must persist in that deadly separation of thought and feeling, of thought and life which is one of the most dangerous threats to life because it inevitable leads to thought over life, to the eclipse of life before the symbolic representations thereof.

This ascetic self-sacrifice made by many priests in a white lab coat, and their imitators, by many sober people, many hard-headed empiricists seems quite solemn dignified and meaningful if you are surrounded by it. To sacrifice 'fancy' 'feeling' and these other things that we may have 'order' 'rationality' and other goods seems to be a fair exchange. However, if one is taken out of the environs, as in the dark night we discussed above, it becomes clear that this ascesis is not necessary, and once robbed of its necessity, once it is no longer able to say, that's just how reality is, this world-view seems an odd combination of masochism and silliness. There are many states in which one feels compelled to laugh at these people: their faith in quantification often reveals itself as a trivial form of absurdity. Consider how many behaviors statistical reasoning attributes to the 'average person' at the expense of all 'actual persons' and therein you will see the fanciful character of statistical, quantified and numerical reasoning. When these folks in all their hardheadedness claim to reject anything they cannot touch taste or measure, they seem to forget the absurdity of 'encountering' a number in the world.

Once we have come to the end of our patience with these priests and witch-doctors of science law and truth, we can take a deep breath, relax our bodies and give a great laugh, from the depths of our insides, a cleansing laugh, at the pretenses of these straight jacketed fools, these machine men. This laugh, this euphoria cannot last forever, but it is necessary for us who have been steeped in a culture that takes their hideous babble at face value and trains us to in so many ways. Now, once we have regained ourselves we can move to our positive our joyous task of re-inventing things. We should break the shackles of the idea of the 'present.' This term has 2 major senses, a spatial sense sometimes called 'physical presence' and a temporal sense in which it points to the illusory 'now' which is the negation of the perpetual movement past-future-past. This term has been a major weapon for the old image of thought, and we must be conscious of and suspicious of its incursions into our lives. How might we do this? Well, the answer is quite simple, our philosophy will be oriented not toward documenting 'being' in an eternal present, but our philosophy will be oriented toward the creation of a future. This change is hidden by its obviousness, when we think, when we speak, when we write, it is through a movement into the future, our thought always arrives in the future, and we need only take this seriously in order to come to a new image of thought.

Much has been written against the metaphysics of presence, by Derrida and by many other thinkers. The notion of presence, though it seems like the most simple and self-evident notion in the world depends on some very deep seated metaphysical and moral prejudices. For example, the idea that there is a now that is isolable from all that has gone before and all that will come after is certainly an error. Even as we name the isolable moment it becomes past, even as we examine an object that is in 'immediate physical presence' this examination invokes that which has gone before. There are many examples but for now let these suffice. The larger point is that both of these notions of presence are theological. The theological is that which claims to provide an explanation but refers in the last instance to a command or a tautology as a means of excluding several equally possible alternatives in favor of one. The senses of presence rely on and support inherited formulaic means of speech that have as their most common contents the divinity, and attribute quasi-divine status to any other identity that would fill them. The dominant characteristic of the divinity in this sense, is that which can be said to be all things and no things in equal truth, "God is love, is war,......n" and "God is not the forests, God is not the trees....n". Another example is the self-presence of the subject in Descartes' philosophy, which must in the last instance be guaranteed by God, and is thus a theological concept that founds the legitimacy of a search for certainty, the adequacy of only a single representation, a single answer in his system.

Materialism is that philosophy which does not accept the refuge offered by theological thinking. Materialism is atheological and atheist as well as adeist. Some claim that deism is compatible with materialism, but as can be seen from the philosophy of positivism and other modern day idealisms, materialism is based on fathoming the consequences of the death of God for knowledge, whereas these schools retain a theological concept of knowledge in many respects. The deistic philosophies banish God from day to day life and natural processes, but bring him back at their convenience to establish transcendence. This form of opportunism is denied the materialist who does not even desire 'truth' if truth requires the invocation of a supernatural power to justify itself. Such an invocation is despicable to the materialist, it seems to be less than a confession of ignorance which is at least honest.

Anyone who believes in being believes in God. Or as Nietzsche said, "I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar." The materialist position affirms becoming, and has a keen sense of the crevices and dark spaces where crouching gods lie in wait. The empty rooms with locked doors, the boarded over attics, the bricked in windows, and sets out to open them to the light. The materialist recognizes that the idea of God can be used to justify anything and thus sees it as untenable. This concept has myriad names, God Allah, Yahweh, Truth, Reason, Experience all of which play the same pernicious role; the reduction of multiplicity and possibility to the command for uniformity and obedience. This same holds true for the distributed Gods, the systems which use concepts that presuppose the existence of a divinity to make them systematic though they deny his name.

The act of naming created two things symbols and Gods. As Nietzsche said the powerful were the namers of things. The story of God giving man the right to name things in the garden, and thus granting retroactive transcendent justification to all the contingent names and categorizations of things in the present is one of the lowest priestly mystifications in history. Man took the right to name, the names were made to stick through violence and terror. Thus, we must see theology with contempt. Whether a theology of God or Reason, or the Concept or whatever. It is the worst form of idolatry, as it distracts attention from the situations in which human action can have a meaning in favor of an immutable plane of untouchable significations. It distracts us from the exploitation and death, the exaltation and joy of life. In the end, theo-idealism lies when it attempts to justify itself in terms of responsibility, it is the historical evasion of responsibility; the history of people denying their responsibility for their social conditions and decisions because these are dictated by "Logic" "Calculations" "Duty" or the "Will of God."

Two philosophers who participate in this a-theologizing stream are Marx and Nietzsche. Both of these thinkers are historical philosophers, they acknowledge becoming or change as the basic principle in a Godless universe. Both of these thinkers attempt to think through the ruthless critique of everything to its limits. They come to some very similar conclusions as to the nature and project of philosophy. Marx and Nietzsche were two of the first thinkers to grasp the consequences of the death of god. They seem to have done so to a greater extent than many of their disciples. It may even be fair to say that philosophy has regressed or stagnated in the current era due to a hard earned misunderstanding or ignorance of the projects and the problems to which these men dedicated themselves.

Each time philosophy overturns an idol it must re-orient itself around said overturning. This results in a new way of addressing the problems of philosophy, and new formulations, new questions, new values new assumptions and new critiques. For example, for Marx and Nietzsche the death of God as a credible reference for philosophical argumentation has many consequences. First, there is no 'beyond' no other world than the material world, ideas derive from material processes in history, not the other way around. Second, and following from the first, transcendence in theory is not tenable, the concepts that derive from material processes are partial, they cannot comprehend, but merely participate in the processes. Concepts do not take us outside of what we address ourselves to and allow for a pure perspective. This only seemed to be the case because God was the guarantor of transcendence, but without God it falls apart, it is much more difficult to attribute this function to the idea unless as a mask of the divinity.

This led to a re-valuation of philosophy, the shift from passive philosophy to active philosophy. In the past, the adequacy of representations of being was guaranteed by revelation from the other world. For Marx, the revelation if placed within history is not direct communication with the divinity, but socially motivated speech that is implicated in the class struggle in the society in which it is manifested. For Nietzsche, revelation is the product of physiological factors combined with power struggles within the society. When we no longer have this guarantee, it does not make sense to continue thoughtlessly in the same beaten paths, but it becomes necessary to re-value philosophy. This revaluation is the shift from passive, reception/elaboration of revelation philosophy to active philosophy. In Nietzsche active philosophy pertains to the evocation strengthening and creation of the overman and in Marx it pertains to the strengthening and creation of a new historical actor called the proletariat. Both of these philosophies are oriented toward a future, toward a possibility that their writing and their acts on the Earth will bring to fruition, or at least advance.

We can call this new image of thought "poeitic philosophy" after the Greek word for making because this philosophy has as its goal the making of a future. This philosophy addresses itself to the becoming future in each person, not to the sense of stability and order, but to the sense of possibility. Thus, it is an open, exuberant and joyful enterprise. This is still philosophy in the sense of a 'friendship' relating to 'knowledge'; only we have switched the focus somewhat, the highest form of knowledge for us is the knowledge of possibility, not the immutable constants extracted from becoming like Plato focused on in his worship of mathematics, not natures and essences as a phenomenologist would have us seek, but something else.