ABSTRACT
Georg Simmel's project for grounding a social ethics of the autonomous moral subject in complex societies, therefore, focuses on overcoming the Kantian dualism between individual life and obligation. The tension-fraught relationship between the creativity of social action and the reproductive imperatives of social structure then takes the shape of an irreconcilability between the progressive and conservative tendencies of the subjective conduct of life. The fact that in modern times no ethics emerge which are capable of shaping anew the individual's life conduct in complex societies and of overcoming the socially determined heteronomy of the moral subject depends for Simmel on the traditional ethical way of thinking. According to Simmel, only a recurrent synthesis of the opposition between nationality and transnationality could instead constitute the basis for a kind of 'German national consciousness', which explicitly takes into account the contradictory tendencies of its being.
