In his final work, The Paradox of Morality (1981), Jankelevitch turns his attention to the fundamental questions of the moral life: the struggle between egoism and self-sacrifice, the question of whether pure or infinite love exists, and moral agency in the pursuit of human rights. In dialogue with philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche, Jankelevitch proposes that the moral life comprises an acrobatic act in which we must balance the demands of love and our responsibility to the other against our natural attachment to the self. Morality is the activity of realizing and combining, in each individual action, the maximum amount of love possible with the minimum of being. This oscillation between self and other-and between being and love-is never fixed or stable. In the end, morality is not something that exists in the world of contemplation; instead, it is the substance of what must be done here and now: created anew in each new moment.
