I have a number of qualms with Eagleton's type of analysis in general*, but I do not begrudge him the idea that modern subjectivity is key for the rise of aesthetics. I would argue, however, that in the Kant chapter his argument is slipshod, imprecise, and too underdeveloped to support his claim. What I really want to look at it, though, is Eagleton's idea that the model of the aesthetic in Kant mirrors bourgeois hegemony.
For Eagleton, Kant's idea of the so-called universality of a judgment of the beautiful is key. Such a judgment is not tyrannical, since it does not coerce agreement, but is hegemonic because it requires a kind of individually, subjectively proffered agreement. That is, because of the indeterminacy of the judgment of beauty, there are no laws or concepts with which any rational being must concur. At the same time, the judgment of beauty seems to act in accordance with the determinate model which demands the agreement of any rational being.
This idea of demanding agreement is of course one of the central pillars of Kant's practical reason, i.e. the ability to act morally. Notably, moral action does not consist of judgment (thus the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgment). Instead, proper moral action is structured by a priori moral principles. The reason for this, as Eagleton notes, centers on the "is/ought distinction." It is central for Kant that what we ought to do morally cannot be based on what is simply being done because what is being done is for Kant contingent and indeterminate (ad hoc) as it does not adhere to any higher (a priori) principles. What is, therefore, would seem to allow for what we can call a situational ethics, and situational ethics can lead us down a dangerous path. So, Kant must establish a priori and "universal" moral principles. Our freedom, or ability to act morally, consists in whether we realize and follow these dictates or not. Kant thinks that every person of sound mind has the ability to recognize these moral principles through their practical reason, but of course we may choose to act in accordance to these principles or not. This is our moral freedom.
Moral action for Kant is therefore what Albert Borgmann (following Aristotle) calls apodeictic. It is lawful, and "[i]f the laws and conditions are accepted as true and the rules of logical inference are followed, then the truth of the proposition that refers to the event to be explained cannot be refuted" (Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life 20). In Kant's moral philosophy, then, proving a priori moral principles means that you essentially have no choice but to agree with them. You are not coerced to act in accordance with them, but you cannot refute the moral truth, so to act otherwise is basically willful perversion (a very unsatisfactory definition of moral freedom, we might add).
Now, in Eagleton's account, aesthetic judgment for Kant allows for a kind of personal freedom outside of the dictates of moral lawfulness. At the same time because a judgment of the beautiful appears to require assent from others, it "ensures between human subjects a spontaneous, immediate, non-coercive consensus" (The Ideology of the Aesthetic 98). It is precisely here that Eagleton is, I think, wrong.
As I mentioned in class, what interests Kan about the beautiful is the conditions of the possibility of the category of the beautiful. One of those conditions is that beauty, in an important way, is not in the eye of the beholder, or not only in the eye of the beholder. If it were, of course, judgments of beauty would simply be solipsistic and capricious, i.e. not judgments at all in any real sense of the word. Judgments of beauty ask for universal consent, but do not do so logically or apodeitically. Beauty is always indeterminate (i.e. not governed by laws), which is what allows for judgment in the first place. Moral action profoundly does not allow for judgment. Thus, aesthetic judgment is central to Kant's thinking in a way that we sometimes forget.
But when Kant (in my reading) says that a judgment of beauty requires assent, he avowedly does not mean that such a judgment receives assent. This is where Eagleton appears to misread. The judgment of beauty does want to develop consensus, but it does not do so by producing instantaneous assent. It acts as if it is an apodeictic proposition, but in fact it is not. Rather, the judgment of beauty is (to borrow from Borgmann again) a deictic proposition which is able "[t]o articulate something, i.e. to outline and highlight the crucial features of something" (25) and is able to offer a different kind of explanation than an apodeictic proposition is. The latter is a case of subsuming something a set of laws (or a priori principles) and following the chain, while the former seeks to articulate something of more than subjective significance that is not necessarily lawful.
The aesthetic judgment is not, at least for Kant, a negatively subjective one. That is why he is philosophically interested in it. It allows for dissent, for discussion, and though it wants consensus, it doesn't necessarily get it. It is thus nothing at all like hegemonic ideology in Eagleton's sense. Aesthetic judgment focuses on particularity, and its "universalism" is a formal and heuristic trait that rescues it from solipsism.** It is, as Hannah Arendt argues in her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy***, the model upon which a kind of radical freedom not found elsewhere in Kant might be based. Arendt's engagement with the Eichmann trial led her to the Third Critique because, in her argument, Adolf Eichmann was incapable of judgment in any strong sense. What he could do, and did do, was subsume particulars under a set of rules and use those rules to determine the appropriate course of action.**** This is the apodeictic model, the model of Kant's metaphysics of morals. What the deictic model is at least capable of doing is both asking and answering questions about significance and meaning to ourselves and to others, and thus of providing criteria for a radically free judgment that is nonetheless not solipsistic. Kant's notion of aesthetic judgment, then, opens art for discussion and debate and, contra Eagleton, fundamentally allows for dissent and disagreement while only formally calling for universality.
On this argument, then, each art object has within it the potential for "universality" inasmuch as it can be considered beautiful; that is, beautiful in Kant's specific definition. It is certainly the case that one must live in a "modern" society for art to take on this aesthetic universality, as art becomes divorced from faith, spirituality, and cosmology only in modernity (C.f. R.G. Collingwood The Principles of Art & Giorgio Agamben The Man Without Content), so an art object cannot be transhistorically universal (again, this is for Kant).
As such, the idea of aesthetic universality can certainly be seen as a chauvinistic one, even when we make a clear distinction between an actual claim to universality (which I argue Eagleton does) as opposed to a formal one. Problems concerning nationalism, state art, blood and soil rhetoric, and art as ideology can still be found in claims of formal universality. What cannot be substantiated, at least in my reading, is that art and aesthetics are hegemonic (in Eagleton's sense) based on Kant's idea of universal assent to judgments of beauty.
The overall scope of what Eagleton is trying to argue—that Kant's notion of judgment of the beautiful provides for both the strong self-defining subject of modernity (a term of Charles Taylor's that I prefer immeasurably to Eagleton's never defined "bourgeois subject") in its stress on the individual judgment as well as for a larger community through a sensus communis in its so-called universality—strikes me as fundamentally correct. Hence art and aesthetics are one aspect of modern (capitalist, liberal, patriarchal, etc.) Western ideology in that they reinforce and articulate the modern subject.
But Eagleton goes wrong when he writes that Kant's aesthetic judgment works on the same model as ideological hegemony (as he does when presents Kant's moral law as equivalent to Marx's commodity form, a rather outrageous claim). Such a claim turns on the idea of an actual consensus being required by aesthetic judgment. In fact, Kant's idea of aesthetic judgment allows precisely for disagreement, argument, and rupture. That Kant can only find this radical freedom in the realm of judging artworks is, of course, deeply problematic in its own right.
*He, like many Marxist critics, is happy to historicize philosophers and submit their work to immanent critique (an important task, no doubt) while at the same time simply reciting from Marx as if Marxian concepts are plainly factual (e.g. the commodity form). More importantly, The Ideology of the Aesthetic suffers from a central problem that (I think) all Marxist/Marxian cultural criticism suffers, the anxiety of history and economics. A committed Marxist must believe that history and economics are the driving forces of human life, and the site of potential for liberatory praxis. So to study literature, or anything other than history and economics, is always going to present a theoretical problem. Eagleton’s book is essentially an apologia for studying literature and culture. In order to justify his work, he argues that the modern bourgeois subject is fundamentally an aesthetic subject. I have no problem with the idea that art and aesthetics as we know them cannot exist without the development of modernity and the modern subject. But to claim, as I think Eagleton does, that art and aesthetics are the defining feature of modern subjectivity seems to me merely a justification for studying art and culture when he knows that the weight of his central intellectual claims lie elsewhere. He also seems to conflate the sublime and beautiful in problematic ways at certain points, and he appears to confuse Kant’s philosophization (if I may coin a word) of certain phenomenological experiences (that of the beautiful and the sublime) with those experiences themselves, putting the cart before the horse if you will.
**Of course, we may not agree with Kant on this phenomenon.
***The lectures, which were to have become the third and final volume of The Life of the Mind entitled Judgment, are entirely concerned with the Critique of Judgment as Kant’s central text of political philosophy.
****Whether Arendt’s analysis is Eichmann is essentially correct is, of course, open for debate. I think her thoughts are germane to my argument here regardless.
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