  A metaphor Sartre and Merleau-Ponty employ frequently is that of the two sides of the artwork, comparable to the two sides of a mirror. The artist only sees his or her own work from the inside; he or she lives the artwork in a sense, since the expressive power is rooted in an idiosyncratic form of being-in-the-world. For the work to become an objective entity with a manifest meaning, the understanding and imagination of the audience needs to reconstruct the meaningful silence in between the traces. And this understanding cannot be passive, since the truly expressive meaning involves a new form of being-in-the-world. The spectator or reader is called upon to effectuate the same original mode of being-in-the-world: “If he is a writer, that is, if he knows how to find the ellipses, elisions and caesuras of conduct, the reader will respond to his appeal and meet him at the centre of the imaginary world he animates and rules” (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 89). Once again, a key feature of aesthetic experience is communication, the ‘echo’ that a subjective attitude to the world finds in others.