Abstract

Tourism is a travel for pleasure, especially for the pleasure of seeing. Baumgarten in his Aesthetica identified beauty as "perfection of sense perception, as such". This can be paraphrased as a state of our mind in which we look in order to look , with pleasure and without having it hindered by anything external or taken over by intellectual cognition. Since tourism meets these conditions, it qualifies as the pursuit of beauty. Analysis of tourist activities in photographing, gastronomy and "consumption" shows that photography, tourism-oriented culinary establishments and admission fees mediate between the tourist and the object visited by making the latter appropriate for the former's aesthetic experience. Aesthetics of tourism is thus both possible and necessary as a bridge between aesthetics and tourism research. Contributions expected from this new field of research include applying Kant's argument of disinterestedness against the current tourism research's uncritical conception of tourists' "consumption" of tourist resources and enhancing, through historical researches on ideal beauty sought by tourists of each period, aesthetics' knowledge of the background against which past philosophers presented their theories of beauty and art