  However, the ‘expressive’ aspect of the artwork, the fact that it is the manifestation of a unique subjectivity, is not the most interesting one for the existentialists; from this perspective, existentialist aesthetics is quite distant from romanticism. This is because existence, freedom and self-determination are, for the existentialists, essentially active and practical notions. The existential choice is not simply a choice of who one should be, in the sense of a choice of personality or character; the theory of existence does not translate into a theory of genius. Rather, the emphasis is on the active relationship within the world, and especially with others. Accordingly, one defines who one is by what one does with one’s freedom in the world, through the ways in which one proposes to change the world, notably in relation to other human agents. When the artist presents the world, whether he or she likes it or not this presentation also proposes to others ways to live in the world and possibly (at least for the most politically minded authors, such as Sartre, de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty) ways to change it. In Sartre’s words, every “imaginary presentation of the world” is an act of “a” freedom speaking to “other” freedoms about possible ways of engaging freedom in the world. Extending Sartre’s definition of the novel, then, we could say that every artwork is an “appeal” (Sartre 1948a, 32).