Zach is an MA student in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. His research interests include the aesthetics of theatrical magic, the history of sorcery and witchcraft in the medieval and early modern periods, and how magical thinking is utilized in socio-political spheres in the twenty-first century.
A post by Zach Kohler
There is something strange about the experience of theatrical magic. Anyone who has watched a good magic trick knows the feeling—it presents itself without fanfare, yet leaves us with the troubled sense that something about the world we take for granted has briefly been unsettled. This post asks what kind of imaginative engagement makes such an experience possible. Against accounts that assimilate magic either to fictional make-believe or to the presentation of known impossibilities, I contend that theatrical magic ought to operate on what I call the cusp of impossibility: a liminal modal space in which events are experienced as radically implausible without being decisively foreclosed as impossible. My claim is that while magic may, and often does, present itself as outright impossible, its most compelling and aesthetically successful instances do not. Drawing on Kendall Walton’s theory of make-believe, Jason Leddington’s alief-based account of illusion, and Richard Moran’s distinction between hypothetical and dramatic imagination, I argue that imagination plays an essential role in magic—not by transporting spectators into a fictional world, but by enabling a resisted, emotionally charged way of relating to our own.
The debate centers around Kendall Walton’s theory of make-believe. In Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990), Walton explains many art forms in terms of games of make-believe, in which real objects function as “props” that generate fictional truths. In theatre, for example, a wooden stage may count as a ship at sea within the fiction. Some have suggested that magic can be understood along similar lines. Spectators imaginatively participate in scenarios where physical laws are bent or suspended, and ordinary objects such as cards or coins serve as props within a fictional world. Yet this division between fictional worlds and real representations falters in the case of magic, since a magic performance uses real, perceptually present objects, not fictional stand-ins.
This difficulty becomes sharper when we consider Walton’s account of emotional response. How can spectators feel genuine emotions toward situations they know to be fictional? Walton’s answer is that such emotions are quasi-emotions—participants in the game of make-believe pretend to be afraid or astonished. Though, magic resists this explanation too, since the audience is not asked to pretend that a dagger is sharp, they must know that it really is, as when a magician cuts fruit with it before impaling the box where an assistant lies. The emotional stakes of magic depend on this realism. Walton’s framework thus captures something important about imagination, but relocates magic too quickly into fiction, precisely where its distinctive tension dissolves.
Professor of philosophy at Bucknell University, Jason Leddington, offers a cogent alternative. Arguing that magic is not fiction, but illusion, Leddington claims that a successful magic performance presents an impossible event as impossible, directly to the spectator. As he puts it, “the spectator should not be called on to imagine that the impossible is happening, because it should already appear so.” (Leddington, 2016, emphasis in original) Imagination, on this view, is superfluous—yea, counterproductive—since fiction requires world-building elsewhere, whereas magic presents itself here and now. The central problem, then, is how such an experience is psychologically possible. How can spectators respond to something they recognize as impossible without endorsing contradictory beliefs?
Leddington’s solution appeals to Tamar Szabó Gendler’s notion of alief. Unlike belief, alief involves the presence of a representational content in the subject’s cognitive system without endorsement. Aliefs are automatic, arational, and affect-laden, and they can conflict with a subject’s standing beliefs without generating irrationality. In the case of magic, the spectator retains the belief that the event cannot really be happening, while simultaneously alieving that it is. For Leddington, this “belief-discordant alief” explains the immediacy and force of magical experience while avoiding appeals to suspension of disbelief or fictional make-believe.
Leddington further insists that alief must be sharply distinguished from imagination. We can imagine at will, and imagining that not-p while believing that p involves no cognitive conflict. One may imagine flying unaided while fully believing it to be impossible, without any pressure on one’s cognitive system. Alief, by contrast, is involuntary and norm-governed. Believing p while alieving not-p places pressure on the subject because the alief is affectively and behaviorally charged. One may, for instance, retain the belief that humans cannot fly, yet feel ill at ease when witnessing an apparent levitation. It is this belief-discordant tension, Leddington argues, that magic exploits—not merely to generate cognitive dissonance, but to maximize it. (Leddington, 2016)
While Leddingont’s account is compelling, it rests on a restrictive conception of imagination—one that too readily identifies imagination with make-believe. Imagination, however, is not tied in any definite way to fiction-making. We routinely imagine aspects of the actual world, including future events, emotional realities, and even highly abstract features of our physical universe, such as curved spacetime or quantum superposition. Moreover, imagination is not monolithic. Philosopher Richard Moran (2017) distinguishes between hypothetical and dramatic imagination. Hypothetical imagination involves impersonal reasoning about what would follow if some proposition were true. Dramatic imagination, by contrast, involves inhabiting a point of view through affective rehearsal and emotional attunement.
Imagination with respect to emotional attitudes, Moran argues, requires more than propositional supposition. In such cases, what is imagined is not merely the truth of a proposition, but a total perspective on a situation. This form of imagination is norm-governed and resistant; although, resistance here is not a rejection of a proposition, but a refusal or struggle to inhabit a point of view. Applied to magic, Moran’s account shows that the spectator’s imaginative engagement is not a matter of entertaining the proposition that an impossible event has occurred, nor of “feigning belief.” Rather, the spectator is drawn—often involuntarily—into a perspective in which the event is experientially real, even as they resist fully integrating it into their understanding of the world. The tension that sustains magical wonder thus arises not from belief-discordant alief alone, but from the spectator’s struggle to inhabit, without collapse, a perspective that places familiar reality into question. Imagination here is not a vehicle for fiction-making, but a way of relating to the actual world through a resisted, emotionally charged perspective.
It may be tempting to say that alief already does all the work attributed here to dramatic imagination, since both involve non-propositional, affectively charged, world-directed states; but this conflation obscures an important experiential difference. Alief generates resistance to belief—a conflict between representational systems—but it does not account for resistance within experience itself. In other words, alief accounts for the onset of magical experience (automatic belief-discordant response), but not the persistence of the experience. Dramatic imagination, by contrast, names the spectator’s ongoing attempt to inhabit a way of seeing that is experientially compelling, yet resistant to full cognitive integration. This distinction explains why good magic does not merely provoke dissonance but invites continued engagement by allowing uncertainty to be maintained rather than resolved or rejected.
This clarifies a further limitation in Leddington’s account. He claims that the object of magical experience is something “impossible and known to be so.” (Leddington, 2016) This overstates the role of settled impossibility in the phenomenology of magic. While spectators typically retain a standing belief that what they have witnessed cannot be explained by ordinary means, the experience itself rarely presents as a confrontation with brute logical contradiction. Even granting belief-discordant alief, the modal character of the experience remains more indeterminate than Leddington allows. While magic may—and often does—force the spectator into contact with events experienced as decisively impossible, this is not where magic is at its aesthetic best. Instead, great magic sustains engagement by holding possibility open just long enough to resist closure. I call this the cusp of impossibility.
The cusp is a liminal modal space in which an event is experienced as radically implausible without being conclusively foreclosed. When impossibility is fully settled, the experience collapses into dismissal or abstraction. By contrast, magical effects often exploit domains of partial ignorance or conceptual openness, where background beliefs remain intact but insufficient to stabilize the experience. The result is not endorsement of impossibility, but a lived uncertainty in which the spectator registers the anomalous event without resolving its modal status. The goal of good magic, on this view, is not to maximize cognitive dissonance, but to maintain a delicate balance that leaves the spectator teetering between the possible and the impossible.
Recognizing magic as operating on the cusp of impossibility allows us to treat alief and imagination not as rivals, but as complementary components of the experience of magic. Leddington is right that magic induces an automatic, affectively charged state in which an anomalous event is represented without belief-endorsement, and alief plausibly accounts for the immediacy and force of this initial engagement. What alief alone cannot explain, however, is the persistence and resistance characteristic of magical wonder. Here Moran’s notion of dramatic imagination becomes indispensable as it sustains the spectator’s relation to the event by holding open a resisted point of view. The spectator imaginatively inhabits a stance in which the event is experientially real while remaining resistant to full cognitive integration. Alief anchors the experience perceptually and affectively, while dramatic imagination shapes and prolongs it by negotiating its unresolved modal status. Together, they explain how magic achieves its distinctive aesthetic power—one that depends not on the maximization of cognitive dissonance, but on its careful modulation.
References
Leddington, J. (2016). The Experience of Magic. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 74(3), 253–264. https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12290
Moran, R. (2017). The philosophical imagination : selected essays. Oxford University Press.
Walton, K. L. (1990). Mimesis as make-believe : on the foundations of the representational arts. Harvard Univ. Press.