Tourism and Semantic Therapy in the Philosophy of Existentialism

Statement of Problem: 

Humans' lived experiences show that individuals need meaning to connect to their "being". However, according to the philosophy of existentialism, there is no pre-designed plan, leading to the challenge of meaning creation in a meaningless world. Some existentialist thinkers, such as Camus and Sartre, believed that man must create and discover the meaning of his life, not the meaning assigned to them by God or nature. After such creation, they dedicate themselves to realizing that meaning to reduce the feeling of loss and regret of the passage of life. Tourism is supposed to give meaning to life while also contributing as an informative and pleasant activity.

Conceptualization is an undeniable necessity in our country, especially in the field of humanities and social sciences. Tourism is one of the areas experiencing a lack of attention in this regard due to its focus on the re-examination of the current concepts and theories while failing to consider novel alternatives. Therefore, the present study aims to foster interdisciplinary knowledge and conceptualization across the intended subject to illustrate the role of different types of tourism in the current human semantic therapy.

Research Question:

 In which method of semantic therapy can each type of tourism contribute?

According to the findings of this study, interdisciplinary concepts can be discovered in two disciplines and specialized discourses of tourism and psychotherapy, yielding a different level of cognition and knowledge. Based on the results, experience and worldly-wise, as one of the ways to make sense of life, had the highest rank, followed by hedonism and self-actualization in the second and third ranks of semantic therapy in different types of tourism, respectively. Also, public interest tourism had the potential to establish the highest number of sense-making ways, followed by community-based tourism, VFR tourism, and ethnic/nomad tourism