What Happens to Literature if People Are Artworks?

This essay looks at the potential philosophical justifications for the social consensus known as humanist reason. Exploring the structure of that consensus in literary criticism and history, it goes on to plumb one possible origin for that consensus in the work of Immanuel Kant. Focusing on an overlap between Kant’s descriptions of the beautiful work of art and his theorization of persons, the essay concludes that the humanist reason articulated in Kant’s work cannot hang together on grounds both philosophical and social. What if, the essay asks, the proximity of the Kantian work of art to the Kantian person were not an effect of a likeness that flows from the pure and unadulteradely self-legislating person toward the work of art, but rather a likeness that moves in the other direction?