In the old argument about the essence of society, there is the view that there is a mystic significance in the idea that all human life drinks first and equally with reality; and there is the view that the essence of society should be only an abstract concept that the observer of the reality of the single existence can grasp afterwards, much as trees and streams, houses and fields are perceived as ‘a landscape’. The Society must concede that in fact this argument has a double meaning. On the one hand, in their immediate sensory existences as carriers of the socializing process, individuals join together to become the higher unity that is called ‘a society’. On the other hand, there are the interests that motivate living individuals to come together – economic and ideal interests, combative and erotic, religious and ‘caritative’ (sic). In order to satisfy such drives, in order to achieve such goals, the immense, manifold forms of social life grow. They all grow with one another, for one another, in one another, against one another, and through one another, in state and community, in church and economic union, in family and associations. Just as energy effects appear from material elements to bring the material into form, so that from innumerable ‘things’ there are human impulses and interests that move us and force us towards others in the forms of unification. Thus, we go from a mere number of co–existing beings to the enduring essence that is a ‘society’.

Within this process, or outside it, there now develops a particular sociological form corresponding to art and play, which draws its form out and leaves its reality behind. It remains here, if the concept of the drive to play or the drive to art possesses a real explanatory value; in any case, it indicates that each single game or artistic activity contains a non–effected universal, which differs from it in content or form.