One of the famous so-called philosophical statements that most of us have heard is this: we are going to die one day, so live life to the fullest. This proposition permeates all self-help books, influencers, motivational movies, and even our closest friends. Everyone feels excited about this declaration, since it denotes that all our sufferings and “depressions” are temporary and will be washed away once we cease to exist. The existential burden is resolved, or one’s existence replenished, through the lens of recognizing existential loss. But the question is: should death be a motivating force for living life to the fullest? And, more importantly, what kind of life will people lead when it is characterized by the impetus of death? Or is this the only valid existential device available?
Death and our mortal nature are facts among the facts we encounter in the world. But we bring this fact again and again into our consciousness to energize our life. This fact thus attains a special existential status. It situates us in the closed temporal plane, urges us to remove all the constraints and useless activities in favour of a plenitude of experiences. It induces the unchecked desire to satisfy every instinct without any sense of a hierarchy of values. At this point, the good life is measured in a quantitative manner. Taking Spinoza’s conception of value judgments, we judge a thing good or bad based on the disposition of our body rather than its nature. Thus, a life structured around desire rather than reason, an impulse discussed above, can lead us to ruin.
Spinoza, in one of his propositions in the Ethics, proposed the fundamental endeavour, a life force that drives the human being to exist and live: “The endeavour, whereby a thing endeavours to persist in its own being, involves no finite time, but an indefinite time.” As Spinoza continues in the explanation, “…the same power whereby it already exists always continue to exist, unless it be destroyed by some external cause, this endeavour involves an indefinite time”. Death presupposes temporality, while the endeavour/fundamental drive is deprived of all kinds of temporality, since its only attribute is to exist and continue to exist. Thus, death loses its character in the abundance of existence. However, our flourishing life force becomes degenerated in the process of the designation of essence and spatio-temporal identification, which makes us employ the thought of death in order to rekindle life , which is nothing but the welling up of our buried endeavour.
We are presented with an abundance of life as we live through existence. The life-sense we experience is represented in our minds. This representation produces spatio-temporal continuity, where our self turns out to be accidentally located. More precisely, the self is a product of this spatio-temporal continuity. It is enveloped around its arche – that which conditions its very existence. Conditional existence becomes the primary mode of being. Internalization of the sense of limitations, which is centered around the self, is the characteristic of the being. The only thought that loosens the strictures of this conditional existence is the thought of death.
The problem with conditional existence is that it goes against the affirmative force of life. It directly contradicts the affirmative act of the mind. Spinoza put forth: “the first and chief endeavour of our mind is the endeavour to affirm the existence of our body: thus, an idea which negatives the existence of our body is contrary to our mind.” Spatio-temporal restrictions produce the idea of negation in the mind; consequently, its endeavour is diminished and resolves its struggle through the negation of negation. The life force, at its purest, affirms rather than negates, which is reflected in the mind as well.
A mind that loses this endeavour never tries to take risks or produce novelty; rather, it remains within its limitations and circles around what is already there. Whitehead clearly points out this merely circular and repetitive act of the mind, which conforms rather than creates:
“In its lowest form, mental experience is canalized into slavish conformity. It is merely the appetition towards, or from, whatever in fact already is. The slavish thirst in a desert is a mere urge from intolerable dryness. This lowest form of slavish conformity pervades all nature. It is rather a capacity for mentality, than mentality itself. But it is a mentality. In this lowly form it evades no difficulties: it strikes out no new ways: it produces no disturbance of the repetitive character of physical fact. It can stretch out no arm to save nature from its ultimate decay. It is degraded to being merely one of the actors in the efficient causation.”
It is impossible for the mind to have a thirst for novelty without an inherent multi-dimensional sense. And this form of sense is only possible in a world where multiple paths are available, where world’s intrinsic structure is filled with infinite potentialities. In his striking essay, Deleuze makes a startling remark: “We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss.” In immanence, everything that “is” is in itself. Ontological plurality is the core of immanence. Thus, in absolute immanence, in a life, the mind can effortlessly strive to produce novelty, which is the consequence of infinite joy, or, in other words, bliss.
Bliss is foreign to conditional existence. As it is divorced from the immanence of life, it can experience only the dull contentment peculiar to the bounds of its world. Only the rapid ping-pong movement around and across the bounds of its world constitutes what is meant by the concept of “living life to the fullest.” In this condition, excitement is possible, but not ecstasy. It loses sight of the grandeur of life hinted at by Deleuze:
“But we shouldn’t enclose life in the single moment when individual life confronts universal death. A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are measured by given lived objects: an immanent life carrying with it the events or singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects.”
Conditional existence also has events and singularities, but only in the form of resemblance.
Swami Vivekananda harshly objects to the above excitement, experienced within the old groove: “Only the fools rush after sense-enjoyments. It is easy to live in the senses. It is easier to run in the old groove, eating and drinking.” And he moves forward and makes an impactful point: “Death lies in the senses. Life on the plane of the Spirit is the only life; life on any other plane is mere death. The whole of this life can be only described as a gymnasium. We must go beyond it to enjoy real life.”
It sums up the whole point of this essay: death lies in the plane of the senses rather than on the plane of life. In the absolute immanent plane of life, death dissolves without a trace. The repository of memory formed by the representation rolls out on the plane without crumbling the life-force, allowing the life-force to actualize the singularities inherent in the repository. The self is the simultaneous production of representations and identification, which creates demarcation from the immanence of life. The very self that we are boasting about prevents us from experiencing an abundance of life, bliss.
Also, we can expect a clear exposition of the process of the degeneration of the life-force into the phenomenal self from Swami Vivekananda:
“…in the Absolute there is neither time, space, nor causation. The idea of time cannot be there, seeing that there is no mind, no thought. The idea of space cannot be there, seeing that there is no external change. What you call motion and causation cannot exist where there is only One. We have to understand this, and impress it on our minds, that what we call causation begins after, if we may be permitted to say so, the degeneration of the Absolute into the phenomenal, and not before; that our will, our desire, and all these things always come after that.”
The famous proclamation that I cited at the beginning of the essay also comes after that. We exist as a cocoon of phenomena, while in reality we are butterflies gliding through the immanence of life.
At the level of reason, the mind primarily affirms life; it strives to promote the betterment of life. But with death as a motivating force, most people strive to experience sensual pleasures as fully as possible. Spinoza sees the absurdity of this form of life in the clearest possible way, “….controlling everything in accordance with their lusts, and desiring to obey fortune rather than themselves. Such a course appears to me not less absurd than if a man, because he does not believe that he can by wholesome food sustain his body for ever, should wish to cram himself with poisons and deadly fare.”
As follows from this, Spinoza attributes affirmation to the character of the free man: “A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.”
That said, by reconnecting with our life-force, we no longer need the “commandment” to live life to the fullest; rather, it becomes our very reality. In other words, “The vitality of thought is in adventure. That is what I have been saying all my life, and I have said little else. Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them. The idea must constantly be seen in some new aspect. Some element of novelty must be brought into it afresh from time to time; and when that stops, it does. The meaning of life is adventure.”
In this picture of the absolute immanence of life, the question of God appears to be missing. Whitehead reconstructs divinity beautifully as an internal creative process in the immanence of life:
“God is in the universe, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. This creative principle is everywhere, in animate and so-called inanimate matter, in the ether, water, earth, and human hearts. But this creation is a continuing process, and ‘the process is itself the actuality,’ since no sooner do you arrive than you start on a fresh journey.
Insofar as we partake of this creative process, we partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is our immortality, reducing the question of whether our individuality survives the death of the body to the status of an irrelevancy.
Our true destiny as co-creators in the universe is our dignity and our grandeur.”
In this way, the problem of God is transformed from that of a transcendent creator into that of an immanent creative process. Divinity is not something external to life, but that through which life continually creates itself. To participate in this creative advance and keep the endeavour afresh is already to participate in the divine. Thus, in the presence of divinity, the thought of death loses its power, or is no longer required.
Bibliography
- Deleuze, Gilles. “Immanence: A Life.” Theory, Culture & Society 14, no. 2 (1997): 3–7.
- Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics. Translated by R. H. M. Elwes. London: George Bell and Sons, 1883.
- Vivekananda, Swami. “The Absolute and Manifestation.” In The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 2. Accessed June 21, 2026. Ramakrishna Vivekananda Archive.
- Vivekananda, Swami. “On Bhakti-Yoga.” In The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 5. Accessed June 21, 2026. Wikisource.
- Whitehead, Alfred North. Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead. Edited by Lucien Price. London: Little, Brown and Company, 1954.
- Whitehead, Alfred North. The Function of Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1929.