  In the same manner, the existentialist philosophers who dedicated the most attention to the articulation of meaning (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) insist on the essentially diacritical essence of the aesthetic element in a given composition: an element has aesthetic significance on the basis of its relation to the other elements, rather than owing to any substantial meaning of its own. It follows that, for example, in a painting the pleasure derived from a particular colour in isolation from the rest of the work is not ‘aesthetic’ in the strong sense but only in a lower sense: as a pleasure for the senses only. This also implies that often the meaning and aesthetic power of a composition (a text, a painting and so on) rests just as much on what is not said or not shown; what lies in-between the elements of the composition, rather than on the elements explicitly shown. The existentialists all insist that meaning is largely to be found in a certain form of silence. In the case of a novel: