The Paths in "Attack on Titan": Reality, Time, Space, Knowledge & Emotions
Placing Hajime Isayama's masterpiece — "Attack on Titan" — in conversation with Carlo Rovelli’s "Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity" & Hegel's "The Phenomenology of Spirit."
Spoiler warnings for: Attack on Titan
Background Info: Concepts
I’ll be using two works to frame my analysis of Hajime Isayama's Attack on Titan (AOT): Carlo Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity and Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit. So let’s dive into some background info on those works first!
Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity
Rovelli is a physicist and an amazing writer who explains complex physics concepts in a way that even those who are more inclined toward the humanities and lacking in a background in physics (like myself), can understand. (I’ve always seen the ability of an expert to explain complex ideas clearly to those who know less about a topic as the true hallmark of intelligence — so I greatly admire his work.)
Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit
Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit is a really long read with a lot of good ideas in it. But for this analysis, we'll be focusing on one idea in the work: the idea that sensory “truth” is fleeting, as it changes based on time, space, and perception. Thus the sensory truth, or the truth of our immediate perceptions, is not the absolute truth; an absolute truth must hold up across perspectives and time, and develop through dialectical contradictions/interaction. ( e.g., “Thing A” comes to know itself through all the ways it is not “Thing B.”)
For Hegel, true understanding only comes when someone reaches “universal spirit,” reaching beyond basic consciousness into a total understanding of the network of people, events, and ideas in which we exist, as well as the way in which the collective consciousness of that network shapes and is embedded in self-consciousness.1 (This last sentence is my go-to very brief synopsis of Hegel’s concept of “universal spirit,” so don’t be surprised if you see it verbatim in some of my other posts.)
The Connection
When reading Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, I was so mind-boggled when I realized that Hegel’s narrative of there being no universal here and now was reflected at the quantum level. Rovelli claims: “Einstein understood that ‘absolute simultaneity’ does not exist: there is no collection of events in the universe that exist ‘now.’"2 This idea of there being no “absolute simultaneity” is embodied in the following Hegel quote, in which the concept of a “here and now” exists only in relation to an individual observer and begins to fade as soon as a moment passes:
“The force of its truth thus lies now in the 'I', in the immediacy of my seeing, hearing, and so on; the vanishing of the single Now and Here that we mean is prevented by the fact that I hold them fast. 'Now' is day because I see it: 'Here is a tree for the same reason. But in this relationship sense-certainty experiences the same dialectic acting upon itself as in the previous one. I, this 'I', see the tree and assert that 'Here' is a tree; but another 'I' sees the house and maintains that ‘Here' is not a tree but a house instead. Both truths have the same authentication, viz. the immediacy of seeing, and the certainty and assurance that both have about their knowing; but the one truth vanishes in the other.”3
Through the history of physics leading up to quantum gravity that Rovelli outlines in his book, we see a continuous simplification of the world, as we go from understanding the world to be made up of many components to fewer components as physicists gain better clarity as to what is happening at the quantum level. For instance, space and time are now understood to be one in spacetime, and fields and particles are now understood to be one in the quantum field.4
Rovelli states, “The world is strange but simple.”5 This claim can be paired with physicist John Wheeler’s idea in “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links” that both probability and time were “invented by humans” and thus humans “have to bear the responsibility for the obscurities that attend it.”6 There is so much going on in this world that our senses cannot perceive, and in our human attempts to explain what we perceive with the limited range of our senses, we complicate things, bring ourselves burdens that come with obscurities, and can bring ourselves to stray further from the truth. It is thus important for us to know how to embrace states of not knowing in our pursuit for truth and knowledge.
This entire concept of sorting through distractions and that which only seems to be true in order to achieve a higher form of knowing is embodied by the stages of experience in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. According to these stages, to rise from a state of basic consciousness to absolute knowing, one must level up from sense-certainty, to perception, to understanding, to self-consciousness, to reason, and then to spirit. For instance, for Hegel, sense-certainty is something immediate and non-universal, as it exists in a specific moment and then disappears and can become something else.7 This relates to Rovelli’s comments on how, “If we look at a stone, it stays still. But if we could see its atoms, we would observe them to be always now here and now there, in ceaseless vibration.”8 In this sense, not even objects are solid and permanent; everything is an event that is in the process of happening. However, we perceive a rock to be solid and still, because our senses only allow us to see that far and that is how it appears to us in the moment.
As I read through Hegel and Rovelli’s works for a class I was enrolled in during my MA program, my brain inevitably shifted to my all-time favorite anime: Attack on Titan (AOT). (Granted, about 20% of all my daily thoughts are about AOT, Jujutsu Kaisen, or Evangelion.) Anyways, I found myself interested in analyzing AOT with the idea of the world being a collection of events, rather than stable, fixed things, in mind.
These next few sections will mainly be a synopsis of AOT’s plot and important concepts (with spoilers!). If you’re familiar with AOT, you can skip to the section “AOT: The Linear Experience of Space & Time.”
Background Info: AOT
Spoiler warnings for: Attack on Titan
The plot of AOT is very complex and layered. I’m not sure how I’d even begin to briefly summarize it and do Isayama’s brilliant creation justice. I guess if you really want to simplify it, it's about a boy named Eren and his two best friends on a quest for freedom, which starts with a mission to obliterate man-eating Titans, but slowly unravels into a wholly new truth: the real enemy is a human society across the sea — the Marleyans — and a long, tragic history of oppression and violence. Eren and his friends are part of the oppressed group — the Eldians.
The Eldians have largely been living within Titan-surrounded walls on Paradis Island. However, some Eldians do live in Marley, where they’re discriminated against and weaponized. Marleyans have long feared Eldians for their ability to transform into Titans, but also use that power of the group they oppress to maintain global power.
AOT: The Paths
Spoiler warnings for: Attack on Titan
But the larger plot aside for now, an important aspect of the later half of the plot is something called the Paths. The Paths is a channel, or alternate dimension, by and in which people of the show’s fictional Eldian race are connected. Among Eldians, there are nine Titan shifter powers, which is to say there are nine, transmissible strains of the ability to shift back and forth between human form and a large and powerful Titan form. The nine types of Titan powers are: Founding, Attack, Armored, Female, Beast, Colossal, Jaw, Cart, and War Hammer.
The Titan shifter powers are typically distributed among different Eldians, and those who inherit the powers also inherit the memories of all those who previously had their Titan power strain; the past carrier of that power thus becomes a part of the current shifter’s conscience. In the case of the Attack Titan, the shifter also gains access to the future memories of subsequent shifters, meaning they hold knowledge of the past, present, and future — but only as they exist from the perspective of the past, present, and future Titan shifters.
Eren uses the Paths to observe the past and future, and to understand not only the present in terms of the past and future, but also the past and future in the terms of the present. In the Paths, Eren can: 1) view the outcomes of his choices, 2) view the big picture of how his and everyone else's lives relate to and affect each other, and 3) influence select actions of select individuals within the timeline he and his Titan predecessors and successors are a part of via their collective memory. (To clarify on this last point, he isn’t time traveling, but rather entering different moments in time through the other Titan shifters’ memories to influence the unfolding of events to align with his vision.) Let’s bracket this for a moment to talk about freedom.
AOT: Freedom
Spoiler warnings for: Attack on Titan
The idea of freedom plays a big role in AOT. Eren grew up in Paradis, longing to see the world beyond the walls. When Eren learns about the oppression of Eldians by the Marleyans — who have been living freely at the expense of the Eldians — he decides to eliminate his oppressors. He uses the Paths to determine the course of action that will best lead to his desired outcome.
Eren ultimately decides the best way to secure future freedom and happiness for his friends is to start “The Rumbling,” in which he mobilizes an army of Colossal-sized Titans with the intent of eliminating most of humanity, villainizing himself, and forcing his friends’ hands into killing him. (He does this in the hope of turning his friends into heroes who could go on to be accepted by the rest of the world, despite the long-lived fear and mistreatment of Eldians.)
In doing so, Eren would never get to experience the freedom he had long dreamed about, but he would be able to give his dream of freedom to the people he loves and the rest of the Eldians. In order to become someone who grants freedom, Eren has to become someone who takes away freedom, and who doesn’t get to experience freedom himself. Even with access to a non-linear timeline of events as it revolves around his strain of Titan power, there was only so much information in the Paths, and thus only so many possible adjustments and outcomes Eren could influence. This parallels Rovelli’s understanding that “the first meaning of quantum mechanics is the existence of a limit to the information that can exist within a system: a limit to the number of distinguishable states in which a system can be.”9
AOT: The Linear Experience of Space & Time
As the series of events Eren influences unfold, many people Eren knows die. Yet, Eren doesn’t feel or show any signs of remorse or grief. He saw their deaths as inevitable and as a way to achieve the best possible outcome — he only saw their deaths in terms of the big picture, and thus did not feel the deaths in the moments they occurred.
As I was rewatching and rethinking about the plot of AOT, Eren’s decisions and behaviors, and the concept of the Paths, I started to consider the relationship between all-encompassing knowledge of the world — such as its functions, where it has been, where it is, and where it will be — and the emotional aspects of the human experience. I started to wonder:
Is it possible that complete understanding can prevent us from experiencing certain emotions that we largely consider a natural part of being human, since emotions such as sadness, anger, and confusion are often rooted in our inability to understand how something that is happening in a moment has a bigger-picture meaning? If so, is it possible that in a state of complete knowing we would learn to experience a different set of emotions that better fits with our more comprehensive understanding?
How’s the structure of our emotions and the ways in which we experience them tied to the seemingly linear way we experience existence? Similarly, how’s our emotional structure and experience tied to the fact we seem to experience time and space separately, even if they are not truly separate. What would our emotions look like — and how would they form — if our experience of time and space collapsed onto each other, as they do in the Paths?
AOT: The Narrative Structure, Plot Twists & Various States of Knowing
The thing that amazes me most about how AOT is crafted is that it really forces you to experience a state of epiphany alongside Eren and the other characters. You really do start out thinking it’s just a show about people living inside walls fighting Titans, only to have a complete reality shift when the history of Eldians and Marleyans are revealed. Throughout all of the rising action, you think you know what you’re watching. But the narrative you’ve experienced, are experiencing, and have been using to predict what comes next ends up taking a completely new course. Another major shift in reality and understanding occurs when you learn that Eren has been influencing the narrative all along through the Paths. (While there are debates about how long Eren has been influencing the narrative, I tend to fall into the camp that believes it starts the moment Mikasa wakes him up under the tree in the opening scene.)
At the Ocean: Freedom, Burden & Knowledge
I think this concept of epiphany is perhaps best captured in the scene where Eren and his friends reach the ocean for the first time. When they’re at the ocean, Eren has the most clear understanding of the timeline they’re in. His friends have a better understanding of their reality than they did at the start of the series, but they don’t see it in the context of the future as Eren does, even if what he sees is only partial. The others splash in the ocean and have fun, the ocean to them symbolizing the hope and freedom that comes with a bigger world, free from the walls and Titans that once encapsulated them.
However, Eren fixates on the idea of their enemies beyond the ocean, and the need to eliminate them for his friends to truly be free. He points out beyond the ocean and says: “On the other side of the sea is freedom. That's what I always believed. But I was wrong. On the other side of the sea are enemies … If we kill all our enemies over there, will we finally be free?10
It’s because Eren has greater knowledge about the timeline they inhabit and what needs to be done to achieve his ideal of freedom that he:
Only sees this moment at the ocean as one step, not an endpoint, in the larger process of achieving true freedom.
Is unable to enjoy the sensory experience of what appears — on the surface — to be freedom, alongside his friends.
In line with the Hegel quote about sense-certainty at the start of this post, the ocean that stands before them comes to be a different ocean based on who is perceiving it. Eren's ocean embodies his disillusionment, and his inability to be in the “here and now,” partially because of his knowledge that a true “here and now” cannot exist. He’s experienced so much unraveling of what only appeared to be true, and he’s now carrying knowledge of truths that will eventually unravel for those around him — and he’s keeping that knowledge all to himself.
The ocean also comes to embody the limits of the other characters’ state of knowing. In doing so, the ocean gifts those characters with a realization that makes them feel light, buoyant, and happy, which are not uncommon sentiments when knowledge is limited, as it allows one to focus only on what’s directly in front of them. “Ignorance is bliss,” as the old adage goes.
But for Eren, the ocean comes to embody the limitlessness of his own knowledge, as well as the dissonance between the limitlessness of his knowledge and the limitations of his actual capabilities/powers. He can no longer experience life alongside his friends because he now exists on a higher plane of knowing. This is further complicated by the fact that he doesn’t fully share what he knows with the others, taking on the burden of protecting them and villainizing himself all by himself. The epiphany the ocean delivers leaves him feeling encumbered and disconnected from his lived experience and the tangible world and happenings in front of him. (Hegel actually has some cool commentary on the importance of finding a balance between your presence in the sensuous, material world and the higher spiritual world to remain a properly functioning human, so maybe that’s an idea for another post at another time.)
AOT: The Trap of Sense-Certainty & The Experience of Unraveling Truths
Ultimately, the experience of watching AOT emulates the narrative. You become a victim of your assumption of absolute knowledge, and with each new twist in the story, you're forced to reconcile with the fact that you know nothing, and that you’ve falsely believed in every sense-certainty presented to you — and that’s because you experience time and space in a linear way.
In the same vein, AOT’s narrative speaks to Rovelli’s claim that “If we look at a stone, it stays still. But if we could see its atoms, we would observe them to be always now here and now there, in ceaseless vibration,” and Hegel’s claim that “The force of its truth thus lies now in the 'I', in the immediacy of my seeing, hearing, and so on.”1112
This is because the story and narrative structure of AOT shows us that everything our immediate senses perceive to be the whole — and what may actually be true to our immediate sense in terms of bits and pieces of the sensory truth, but not in terms of the whole, absolute truth — may not be the actual truth. Echoing the ideological idea presented by Rovelli and Hegel, the AOT narrative shows that the actual truth can only come when you reach beyond your immediate senses, look at things beyond the sensory and surface level, and start to really understand the underlying network that connects everything and everyone through, with, and to space, time, events, memories, etc.
While this can be understood as commentary on how our senses, as well as perspective, can deceive us into thinking we have absolute knowledge, it’s also important to note how it speaks to the effects of experiencing time linearly, as we do. The linearity of our experience, and the ways in which we experience time and space separately, can also lead us to have deceptive sentiments about absolute knowledge.
When I pair this experience of unraveling truths in AOT alongside the ideas of space, time, linearity, and the human experience in AOT, I find myself more broadly thinking about what aspects of our existence, which we take to be innate, become redefined and/or replaced when we:
Reach a state of absolute knowing. (Which Eren experiences through the Paths.)
Are amid a state of upheaval — both due to and of our falsely assumed state of absolute knowing. (Which all the other characters in AOT, as well as the viewer, experience with each new piece of information delivered and/or plot twists.)
I don’t have an answer to either of these questions, but they’re concepts I’m curious about.
Anyways, AOT is a brilliant piece of art. I like it so much that I got the Scout Regiment’s blades tattooed on my back. I highly recommend watching the anime and reading the manga if you haven’t already. :)
G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1977), 213.
Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 2018), 73.
G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1977), 61.
Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 2018), 129.
Ibid, 129.
John Archibald Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,” Proceedings III International Symposium on Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, 1989, pp. 309-336, 317.
G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1977), 61.
Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 2018), 132.
Ibid, 13.
Attack on Titan, Episode 59, “The Other Side of the Wall,” directed by Tetsurō Araki, aired July 1, 2019, on NHK General TV, produced by Wit Studio, 20:56-21:39.
Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 2018), 132.
G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1977), 61.
The screenshots included in this article are used under the Fair Use doctrine for the purposes of commentary, criticism, and educational analysis. All visual content is the property of its respective copyright holders. No copyright infringement is intended.
Full citations for screenshots:
IMAGE 1: Attack on Titan, season 1, episode 2, “That Day,” directed by Tetsurō Araki, aired April 14, 2013, on MBS, produced by Wit Studio, 0:41.
IMAGE 2: Attack on Titan, season 4, episode 19, “Two Brothers,” directed by Yuichiro Hayashi, aired January 24, 2022, on NHK General TV, produced by MAPPA, 16:47.
IMAGE 3: Attack on Titan, season 3, episode 22, “The Other Side of the Wall,” directed by Tetsurō Araki, aired July 1, 2019, on NHK General TV, produced by Wit Studio, 21:40.