Cain S. Todd
Conceptual issues
Any account of the importance of the aesthetic in tourism must begin by acknowledging some initial conceptual obstacles that make it particularly difficult to provide any definitive overview of this topic. First, the scope of the term‘aesthetic’ is notoriously unclear and remains the subject of philosophical dispute. Pre-theoretically, it can be used to qualify virtually anything, including objects, values, attitudes, judgements and experiences. It is far from obvious what all of these phenomena have in common in virtue of which they are aesthetic. Indeed, clear and uncon-troversial definitions and demarcations of ‘aesthetic’ have proved no less elusive than attempts to capture the essence of beauty.
Second, although beauty might be thought central to the nature of aesthetic appreciation, there is an indefinitely large range of aesthetic values (and disvalues), which includes, for instance, elegance, ugliness, prettiness, gracefulness, garishness, daintiness, harmony, the pictur-esque, the sublime and so on. Third,‘tourism’ denotes a formidable array of different practices, attitudes, motivations and behaviours, often delimited by specific epithets, e.g. ‘mass tourism’,
‘leisure tourism’, ‘agri-tourism’, ‘adventure tourism’, ‘package tourism’, ‘sustainable tourism’,
‘ethical tourism’, ‘cultural tourism’ and so on. Fourth, the scope of the term ‘natural environ-ment’ is equally vast and immensely varied, encompassing everything from pristine wilderness areas to urban parkland, gardens and environmental art; it embraces individual objects ranging from small pebbles to large elephants, and‘items’ ranging from beaches to herds of wildebeest;
it ranges through species of fauna andflora, from small to large ecosystems, and it incorporates objects, phenomena and forces that both conform to and elude all of our different senses.
It is thus evident that when all of these variables are combined, no short chapter can hope to do justice simply to the importance of the aesthetic, because there is no one way in which the aesthetic is important, even assuming we can usefully demarcate the relevant notion of‘aesthetic’
at play in tourism.
In addition to these complexities, although some academic disciplines have, for some time now, taken tourism as a phenomenon seriously, few have written explicitly or comprehensively on tourism and aesthetic appreciation (see Tribe 2009: part 3). Rather, of the many potential values and attitudes that the phenomenon of tourism encompasses, the concentration has been
on ethical, economic and social issues. (For examples and further discussion see Fennell 2006;
Urry 2002.) Moreover, although philosophers have had much to say on the nature of aesthetic appreciation, and‘environmental aesthetics’ has become a burgeoning sub-field within philo-sophical aesthetics, they have all but completely ignored the concept and phenomenon of tourism.
None the less, the aesthetic appreciation of natural environments is closely bound up with the nature of tourism, and philosophical reflection on the former can provide some important conceptual tools for understanding the latter, and their inter-connection. An examination of philosophical accounts of the aesthetic appreciation of nature, therefore, provides certain key concepts that can be employed to illuminate the role of aesthetic value and appreciation in tourism generally. In addition to standard aesthetic values such as the‘beautiful’ or ‘sublime’, other prominent values that require examination are the‘trivial/serious’, and the ‘authentic/
inauthentic’.
Finally, we must highlight an important distinction that underpins the main topic of this chapter, namely that between a descriptive and normative way of understanding the role of the aesthetic in tourism. The descriptive dimension addresses the myriad ways in which tourists, and tourism in general, are in fact concerned with issues of aesthetic value, and might provide answers to questions such as: what sorts of norms govern the formation of aesthetic preferences and motivations in tourism? The normative dimension, in contrast, will treat questions that are less empirical in nature and philosophically more substantial, such as: should aesthetic con-siderations play a central role in shaping tourist preferences and environments? What role(s) should this be? Can reasons be given for preferring certain aesthetic values and preferences, and certain types of tourism that encourage them?
Although the descriptive issue is certainly not irrelevant to normative considerations, the discussion of this chapter, concerned as it is with fundamental values and types of appreciation, will concentrate primarily on normative questions, for two main reasons. First, the empirical data required to establish certain descriptive conclusions are simply lacking in many respects, and as just noted, the phenomena described are too complex and various to say anything substantial and informative about what importance the aesthetic actually has in tourism. Second, insofar as the aesthetic is a fundamentally normative notion, the normative questions about the role of aesthetic value in this area allow for greater theoretical treatment and reflection.
The aesthetic appreciation of nature
In order to understand the role and significance of the aesthetic in tourism, we need some grip on what makes a type of attitude, interest, experience or value an aesthetic one. Although this a hotly disputed philosophical area, there is a particular notion that has, since its formulation by Kant, remained central to most conceptions of the aesthetic; namely, that of disinterestedness. This concept is invoked in order to detach aesthetic interest and pleasure from everyday practical and personal interests and desires, comprising an interest or pleasure in an object (and its perceptual properties)‘for its own sake alone’; that is, not instrumentally, for the sake of satisfying some merely extraneous and self-interested desire or motive (Budd 2002).
The idea of ‘disinterestedness’ also serves, crucially, to demarcate the realm of aesthetic experience, pleasure, appreciation and judgement from the moral and cognitive realms. Beauty, it is often held, is completely distinct from truth and goodness: when appreciating the aesthetic value of something we are not thereby interested in its moral worth, nor in gaining knowledge, say, of what the object of our attention is, or how it functions. Instead, we are simply taking pleasure in its intrinsic value.
Cain S. Todd
Although rather rough, and not uncontroversial, this conception of aesthetic interest does enable afirst attempt to characterise its role in tourism by asking whether there is any form of tourism that does not have at its heart aesthetic interests and motivations, and the desire to experience aesthetic value. And it might atfirst glance appear not. Tourism is one of the main activities in which human beings engage– along with attending concerts, visiting art galleries or admiring landscapes– which seems to be motivated primarily by aesthetic considerations. After all, we visit places in order to see things, to experience unfamiliar, beautiful, and exotic sights and sounds, to experience the natural beauty as well as the art, architecture and culture of foreign shores.
However, equally common motivations for tourism surely exist in the aims of relaxation, escapism, romance and adventure, which by the criterion of disinterestedness might seem to be excluded from the realm of the aesthetic. For these activities are surely interested and self-directed, whereby our surroundings are chosen and enjoyed not solely for their intrinsic virtues but primarily instrumentally, as the means to satisfying our own particular desires and pleasures.
Furthermore, many forms of tourism are clearly concerned with educational and ethical aims, such as learning about the geography or history of a place, or participating in conservation or welfare schemes to aid the local wildlife or population. It is questionable whether the various values at the heart of these different appreciative activities – the exotic, the curious, the difficult, the novel, the interesting, the relaxing, the romantic, the morally rewarding, the intellectually stimulating, etc.– are aesthetic values.
If this were right, then the aesthetic would be important only within certain quite narrowly defined types of tourism. Yet it seems undesirable to say that an aesthetic interest cannot be present in and mixed with other forms of tourist appreciation. After all, surely part of the reason we have chosen the Himalayas for our trekking and rafting adventure, or the shores of the Red Sea for our sunbathing and diving, will often, if not always, consist precisely in there being some sort of aesthetic value that we attach to such places and activities in thefirst place. Moreover, it is far from evident that intellectual or moral interests cannot be combined with aesthetic pleasures, or that the desire to escape the humdrum cannot be in part an aesthetic motivation. Unless we interpret the notion of disinterest/aesthetic interest broadly, therefore, we will be in danger of concluding, extremely counter-intuitively, that anywhere or anything visited as a tourist in order to satisfy some personal desire, or some moral or other prima facie non-aesthetic aim, will thereby be excluded from the realm of aesthetic value; and that is simply not plausible.
The natural response to these worries is to broaden and loosen the constraints on what counts as
‘aesthetic’, without blurring to the point of oblivion the differences between aesthetic and other values.
It is fair to say that nobody has succeeded in doing a fool-proof job of this, but for the remainder of this chapter we can work profitably with a more or less intuitive notion of the aesthetic.
In addition to determining the boundaries and importance of the aesthetic vis-à-vis non-aesthetic dimensions of tourist appreciation, one might also be interested in determining which, among these, constitute appropriate types of aesthetic engagement. This concern has been at the heart of philosophical discussions of the aesthetic appreciation of nature, such as that revealed in the most comprehensive and influential philosophical framework developed in this area, Allen Carlson’s Natural Environmental Model (Carlson 2000).
In order to appreciate nature appropriately, from an aesthetic point of view, claims Carlson, we need to appreciate it as it really is in itself – nature qua nature. The natural sciences – geology, biology, ecology – and their common-sense predecessors and analogues provide knowledge of nature qua nature, nature as it actually is, and hence aesthetic appreciation based on this will be appropriate and objectively valid (see also Stecker 1997; Saito 2004)
On this model, aesthetic appreciation thus involves an essentially cognitive component, for the perception of nature’s aesthetic qualities requires conceptualising natural objects relative to The importance of the aesthetic
the kinds of things they are. Moreover, different types of objects, such as different kinds of landscapes, will call for different ways of perceiving:
we must survey a prairie environment, looking at the subtle contours of the land, feeling the wind blowing across the open space, and smelling the mix of prairie grasses and flow-ers. But such an act of aspection has little place in a dense forest environment. Here we must examine and scrutinize, inspecting the detail of the forestfloor, listening carefully for the sounds of birds…
(Carlson 2000: 50–51) Drawing on these elements, Carlson rejects other frameworks for appreciation, which he claims falsify and trivialise nature. Of particular relevance for our purpose is what he labels the‘landscape model’, which promulgates the ‘scenery cult’. Having its roots in eighteenth century aesthetic theories, practices and preferences, particularly a concern with the‘picturesque’, this model treats nature as if it were a landscape painting or photograph. Focusing attention on colours and merely formal aesthetic qualities,‘flattening’ nature into a static two-dimensional pictorial scene, the approach to appreciation it advocates is thus guilty of misrepresenting nature. Indeed, it involves regarding nature in some sense as if it were art (Carlson 2000: 34).
The main problem with this form of appreciation is that, by focusing exclusively on merely formal properties, on objects independently of the sorts of objects they are, it simply fails to accommodate the many other aesthetically salient properties that nature possesses. It neglects, for instance, the rich, multisensory, active mode of appreciation that the natural environment both encourages and allows. Instead, nature must be appreciated aesthetically also in terms of non-formal qualities such as expressive qualities– for example, the gracefulness of a gazelle, the serenity of the sea, the brooding-ness of the moors.
Other philosophers have also sought to preserve the normative dimension of aesthetic
‘appropriateness’ without, however, appealing to the centrality of scientific knowledge as such.
Instead, they invoke the relevance of other ways of understanding nature, including for instance myth, religion, poetry, art and other types of‘fictional’, imaginative narratives (e.g. Brady 2003;
Eaton 2004; Foster 2004; Saito 1984). Also, according to such accounts, our aesthetic interest in nature should not reside merely in the ‘uninterpreted’ sensory, formal qualities that nature offers. Rather, we should seek to understand natural objects qua the objects that they are, understanding nature on its own terms, where this involves an element of conceptualisation.
But such conceptualisation can, for instance, involve the imagination, where our present per-ception is imbued with imaginative thoughts and feelings; for example, seeing a falling autumn leaf as symbolising temporality and vulnerability.
Here is a widely quoted example from an influential article by Ronald Hepburn:
Suppose I am walking over a wide expanse of sand and mud. The quality of the scene is perhaps that of wild, glad emptiness. But suppose I bring to bear upon the scene my knowledge that this is tidal basin, the tide being out. The realization is not aesthetically irrelevant. I see myself now as walking on what is for half the day sea-bed. The wild glad emptiness may be tempered by a disturbing weirdness.
(Hepburn 2004: 50) Such aesthetic appreciation widens the focus from merely formal properties to what might roughly be called the expressive properties possessed by nature, thereby enriching nature’s aes-thetic value and interest. More significantly, this enriched notion of the appreciation of nature ‘on Cain S. Todd
its own terms’ is not arbitrary or merely subjective, but can be appropriate or inappropriate, allowing us to contrast a‘serious’ aesthetic interest in nature, with a merely ‘trivial’ appreciation.
These‘ways of seeing’ are, it is held, no less ‘true to nature’ than scientific understanding.
The appreciation of both art and natural objects, Hepburn contends, can be more or less serious, where the latter means something like being ‘hastily and unthinkingly perceived’
(Hepburn 1995: 65). Perception can be ‘attentive or inattentive, can be discriminating or undiscriminating, lively or lazy… The reflective component … can be feeble or stereotyped, individual, original or exploratory. It can be immature or confused’ (ibid.: 68). Primarily, ‘an aesthetic approach to nature is trivial to the extent that it distorts, ignores, suppresses truth about its objects, feels and thinks about them in ways that falsify how nature really is’ (ibid.: 69).
Tourism and‘serious’ appreciation
Clearly, these claims have significant repercussions for considering certain common tourist approaches to natural beauty, which manifest an overriding concern with the‘trivial’, ‘superficial’
and‘picturesque’. Certain aspects taken to be definitive of the ‘mass tourism’ so despised by many writing in this area, readily lend themselves to such criticisms: thefleeting and detached modes of transport that fail to immerse subjects properly in their surroundings; the reliance on conventional vantage points and the aesthetic testimony of others; the overreliance on technological inter-mediaries– for example, cameras – to facilitate, capture and define their experiences; and so on.
The distinction between trivial and serious aesthetic appreciation thus offers some funda-mental conceptual tools for assessing the relationship between tourism and the appreciation of nature. It serves to exclude as inappropriate any attitudes to nature that distort, falsify or neglect those properties accruing to them as natural. Thus, it also captures certain intuitions that some types of tourism– and the attitudes, experiences and behaviours associated with them – may be less aesthetically rewarding, rich or authentic than others.
These observations can, however, appear to be weak, misguided or even unwarrantedly eli-tist. Why should we care about misrepresenting nature or the authenticity of our aesthetic experiences of it? After all, if such experiences are held to be aesthetically valuable by the rele-vant appreciators themselves, the simple falsification of the object of the experience is irrelevant to the aesthetic value of the experience per se, however it is gained.
This issue highlights the difficulty in finding aesthetic fault with certain kinds of tourist experiences or attitudes, and suggests why many putative aesthetic criticisms of certain kinds of appreciation are (implicitly or explicitly) underpinned by consequentialist concerns, often of an ethical nature. For example, from an ethical-environmental perspective, it is easy to see how certain attitudes underpinning modern mass tourism, and the cheap travel that enables it, may involve a certain lack of awareness and respect for, say, the fragility or biodiversity of certain
‘unscenic’ natural environments. Moreover, they may even lead to the destruction of the very environments that tourists have come to see.
These kinds of concerns, coupled with practical policy-oriented environmental considerations, clearly motivate normative reflection on the importance of the aesthetic in tourism generally vis-à-vis other non-aesthetic (primarily moral or economic) evaluative considerations. The importance of the aesthetic may therefore be assessed in terms of its instrumental value in the service of these non-aesthetic ends. But does the trivial/serious distinction matter aesthetically as well as ethically?
There are, on reflection, genuine aesthetic reasons that count against certain forms of apprecia-tion, and they appeal both to the state of the appreciator as well as the state of the appreciated, to aesthetic subject and object. For example, in respect of the latter, that mass tourism can come The importance of the aesthetic
to destroy the very elements that gave rise to it in thefirst place is manifested not just in phy-sical changes to a place’s visual appearance, but in the damage to the aesthetic value of a place, the loss of valuable aesthetic qualities. The imposition of too many constructed viewpoints in an area of scenic beauty, for instance, replete with signs and walkways, and with the building of roads to access them, may result in the loss of the‘wild, glad emptiness’ that drew visitors there initially.
There is additional reason, too, to think that certain aspects of tourism can have negative, impoverishing effects on the nature of the aesthetic experiences one might undergo. For instance, elements of mass tourism, such as the frequent speed and superficiality with which places are visited, may limit the time and physical engagement required fully to understand and aesthetically appreciate them. One may simply miss salient aesthetic properties available for appreciation, such as sounds and smells, that are integral to the surrounding environment.
Similarly, as noted above, attention to conventional scenes and ‘beauty spots’ can limit our aesthetic experience and awareness of aesthetic properties because it leads to a focus primarily on formal‘scenic’ properties at the expense of the many other types of properties and experi-ences that nature can offer. These might include expressive properties such as the eeriness of a moor, the solitude of a desert or the chaotic exuberance of a swamp.
Depending on context and whim, the notions of trivial and serious appreciation can be cashed out in any number of different ways, and in terms of any number of different values (and disvalues). A trivial view of nature might encompass a range of different faults and vices, such as simplification, falsification, sentimentality, inauthenticity, arbitrariness and romanticisation. One might, under the sway of a Disney upbringing, view all animals anthropomorphically, falsifying their behaviours and needs inappropriately, and indulging sentimental attitudes towards them.
Or one might have a romanticised view of certain landscapes, desiring to conserve areas which are the way they are because in reality they are full of hardship and poverty (such as many of the pastoral landscapes of Europe).
Sentimentality, simplification, romanticisation and other purportedly problematic attitudes may in general be undesirable traits to encourage, but again it is difficult to say precisely what is intrinsically aesthetically wrong with them, as opposed to what is wrong them in terms of the (ethical) consequences to which they can lead. A sentimental view of animals, for example, may blind one to the need for harsh culling measures to help conserve a particular ecosystem. Yet all of these faults also potentially impose various undesirable limits on our aesthetic experiences of nature. A sentimental conception of animals may hinder one’s aesthetic appreciation of their hunting movements, and of the savagery of nature‘raw in tooth and claw’; an overly developed romantic sense of natural beauty may hinder an aesthetic appreciation of parts of nature lacking in grandeur or obvious scenic appeal, such as a beehive or city park (Todd 2009).
Insofar as such modes of appreciation hinder or impoverish richer, deeper, more valuable aesthetic experiences of nature, they are to that extent aesthetically undesirable, and hence so too are the types of tourism that encourage them. There is thus good reason to think that there may well be aesthetic advantages to, and hence aesthetic (not just ethical) reasons for preferring some types of tourism (and the attitudes accompanying or manifested by them) in nature over others. Assuming the value of certain types of experiences, the aesthetic should no doubt be accorded a great deal of significance in tourist practices.
It is important, however, to acknowledge the limited scope of such claims. Various attitudes and forms of tourism may lead to inappropriate and impoverished aesthetic responses, yet it would appear to be impossible to show that such modes of appreciation necessarily entail such deleterious results; or, at best, that would be an empirical claim about individual (and perhaps collective) psychological states, which would be extremely difficult to verify.
Cain S. Todd