Ever since I first read an introduction to Feyerabend, I have entertained a thought that may well have occurred to many others: if humanity had tirelessly pursued magic—conjuring fireballs and the like—from the very beginnings of civilization, would we be living in a genuinely magical world today? The question still seems interesting, provided we relinquish an excessively Whiggish view of science itself. Beginning with the work of Thomas Kuhn, we have come to understand that many important achievements in the history of science emerged from theoretical contexts that no longer look particularly “scientific.” Galileo’s principles of mechanics had no clear explanatory advantage over medieval impetus theory; Copernicus’s model of the cosmos did not itself have more empirical evidence behind it; even research in modern scientific laboratories is full of compromises that depart from scientific ideals.
In this sense, then, a historicist perspective offers some defense of an anti-realist or non-realist view of science: science may not be the truth; it may not be approaching the truth; science is not even the only way to understand the natural world. This last doubt, in particular, gives us a reason to believe in the existence of a magical world.
In the real world, however, science’s success has left us “too far gone to turn back.” Most of us are unwilling to give up air conditioning, Wi-Fi, and all the other good stuff to explore whether a magical world might be possible. In anime, manga, games, and light novels, at least, we can arrive at a conception of such a world without too much effort. Meanwhile, “wars between science and magic” have become commonplace in works of recent years. By setting the two apart, these works keep drawing our attention to the possibility of a sharp distinction between them. This poses an interesting question: how are we to understand the distinction between science and magic in anime, manga, games, and similar works?
That question is the logical starting point of this essay, and it is a rather complicated one. The first complication is just what our object of discussion should be. Think about it: when we try to say that there is some distinction between science and magic in a work, what, precisely, are we distinguishing from what? When we point to the rocket being launched in Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise and to spirit magic in Record of Lodoss War, and say that these exhibit “the distinction between science and magic,” what should we understand ourselves to be referring to?
We cannot, of course, be referring to a natural entity: a work contains only a constructed fictional world. Nor can any natural entity in itself give us an understanding of science and magic. A natural entity such as a stone is simply a stone. Whether we describe it as “scientific” or “magical” has nothing to do with the stone itself. By the same reasoning, everything associated with natural entities should also be excluded. In reality, science considered as theory can be described as a set of statements, but this is not a reasonable option either. A set of statements is too abstract an object in relation to a work of fiction. Most works do not directly express statements, and our understanding of them seldom depends on abstracting statements from them.
What we are actually referring to should lie between the concreteness of a natural entity and the abstraction of a set of statements. It must also inherently offer us some intelligible meaning. By this standard, imagery may be our most suitable object. Instances of imagery can span an enormous range: from a still object to an unfolding situation, from visual changes of light and shadow to an audible melody. They may even include more abstract aspects of a work, such as the economic system of another world. In any case, an image is a form in which meaning takes shape; through that form, we gain access to meaning. As far as our question about “the distinction between science and magic” is concerned, descriptions such as “scientific” and “magical” can be applied only to the imagery within a work.
The second complication is the perspective from which we should examine this question. There is scarcely a single best choice of theoretical perspective. An empirical sociological approach, for example, might prove highly productive: sociological surveys could tell us in considerable detail how the audiences of different kinds of work understand the distinction between science and magic. The drawback is that, until we clarify what it means to understand descriptions such as “scientific” and “magical,” we can learn at most which works or images are considered “scientific” or “magical,” and by whom. Understanding the survey results themselves would remain very difficult.
In this essay I have chosen a perspective that combines metaphysics and historicism. One strategy for understanding the distinction between science and magic is to understand, separately, what makes each what it is. More specifically, we need to understand the facts, characteristics, or properties on which scientific and magical imagery respectively depend for us. Yet choosing imagery as my object also means that this metaphysical inquiry cannot reach its conclusions largely through conceptual analysis. Instead, the analysis must draw on the circumstances of actual history wherever possible. Anime and similar works are not, after all, creations strictly based on history and reality. At most, their imagery expresses the possibility of a division between worldviews. What is at issue may therefore extend no further than how people have remembered science and magic in the contemporary era—their mnemohistory. A broadly historicist approach is thus an effective way to examine these images.
My plan is first to address two subsidiary questions: what makes scientific imagery scientific? What makes magical imagery magical? These are metaphysical questions, so my approach is to identify a property for each kind of imagery: when an image possesses the relevant property, scientific imagery is scientific, and magical imagery is magical. This difference in properties allows us to understand an image as scientific or magical. Having answered the two questions, I will turn, in the final part, to the “war between science and magic.” It is precisely these two properties, which make each kind of imagery what it is, that are largely responsible for their gradual intermingling and the blurring of the boundary between them.
Let me offer a programmatic conclusion at the outset: in anime and similar works, the division between science and magic arises, more or less, from the projection of the actual history of science into public memory. This may be an intuitive conclusion, but it does a good job of explaining a phenomenon I have not yet mentioned: the blurring of the boundary between science and magic in some works of recent years.