This study deals with the starting point, characteristics, and meanings of I. Kant’s and G. W. F. Hegel’s definitions of beauty. Also discussed are the development and expansion of Kant’s thought in Hegel's discussion by analyzing differences and similarities of both philosophers. The result of this study will provide a new understanding of the association between Kant’s and Hegel’s aesthetics, which are mostly interpreted from the view of the opposition of formalism and contents centered on thoughts. Although Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophical thought and definitions of beauty are different, there is certainly the same point in how they define beauty in the contexts of an attempt to find the possibility of unifying opposite situations such as object and subject, universal and particular, and reason and sensibility. Furthermore, Hegel criticized the subjectivity and abstractness of Kant’s definition of beauty, while we can see that Hegel actively interpreted the characteristics of beauty according to four moments of Kant’s judgement on taste. He accepted and developed it in his definition of beauty of art. The meaning of the contemplation of beauty that Kant and Hegel showed is important even today in that it implicates the issue of Kant’s and Hegel’s theoretical and practical philosophy and enables the recognitions of objects and oneself, the intuition, and the production of truth in the free state of being of objects and subjects.

beauty of art , disinterestedness , epistemology , feeling of pleasure , freedom , idea , judgment of taste , purposiveness