Berserk: A Lesson in Amorality
An appraisal of Berserk in the moralist framework of artistic criticism.
Disclaimer: The following is my first (very rough) draft of an essay for my philosophy course, Ethics and the Arts.
In this essay, I explore the most morally contested scene from the 1997 television adaptation (anime) of Kentaro Miura’s definitive manga, Berserk: the birth of Femto. Alternatively, the rape of Casca. First, I provide brief narrative context about the plot and main characters of Berserk. Next, I argue that the birth of Femto is best understood as the end of the ethical journey that is Berserk. The moral lesson of said journey is to reject the appeal of Machiavellian amorality, which Griffith seduced us into sharing, and to assume the merited response of moral outrage at the inevitable actions entailed by such an (im)moral framework. After I defend both the specific scene and Berserk generally moral grounds, I pivot to explaining how Berserk’s moral-affective achievement constitutes an aesthetic one. In so doing, I take up the moralist mantle from Plato and Tolstoy, rejecting the radical autonomism of Oscar Wilde. Indeed, I hope to demonstrate that the only feature shared by all works of art and, consequently, that which defines all artwork, is their ability to produce affective responses in (perhaps idealized) audiences. I conclude with a discussion of how that artwork involving morality, such as the case with Berserk and other literature, succeeds when the affective responses elicited thereby are merited, borrowing language and concepts from Noël Carroll’s moderate moralist framework and David Hume.
One can appreciate neither the moral lesson nor the aesthetic quality of the final scene of the final episode of Berserk without watching the rest of the show. Nevertheless, a brief synopsis of the plot and its three main characters will have to suffice for this essay. Set during the Hundred-Year War between the Kingdom of Midland and the Tudor Empire, we follow the mercenary Band of the Hawk as it rises to prominence in the ranks of Midland’s military. The Band of the Hawk is led by the ambitious, androgynous (notable, given his later actions and the fact that, biblically, Lucifer is depicted likewise), charming, and the most adroit tactician in the world. Griffith’s two closest commands are Guts and Casca. After losing to Griffith in a duel as an adolescent, Guts assents to fight for the Band of the Hawk ad infinitum in exchange for his life, which Griffith spares and claims for himself. Casca is adopted into the Band of the Hawk as a child after Griffith interrupts her rape at the hands of a nobleman, offering Casca his sword, which she uses to slay her assailant.
The anime follows Guts, the protagonist, Griffith, the deuteragonist, and Casca as they lead the Band of the Hawk on a successful campaign against the Tudor Empire. For their victories on the battlefield, the members of the Band of the Hawk are rendered knights, and their commanders, nobles. Along their rise to fame, the Band of the Hawk draws the ire of a faction of Midland’s nobles, who conspire against them. Griffith commissions Guts to assassinate their civilian antagonists, with which Guts complies. All may be fair in love and war, but Guts reflexively slays an innocent child who witnesses Guts’s assassination of his conspirator father. Guts is haunted by his murder of this young boy. After aiding Griffith in his ascension to nobility and military conquest, Guts abandons his commandership of the Hawks Raiders, the Band of the Hawk, and, after defeating Griffith in a final duel, Griffith himself.
Griffith is psychologically traumatized by Guts’s abandonment, which leads him to, imprudently, consummate his romance with the princess of Midland. Griffith is discovered and, despite the consensual nature of his relationship with the princess, is thrown into the dungeon for his impudence. The Band of the Hawk, now led by Casca, is expelled from Midland and its numbers thinned. Guts learns of these events a year later and joins forces with Casca and the Band of the Hawk to spring Griffith from the keep. With help from the princess of Midland, the Band of the Hawk saves the husk of their formerly glorious leader. The subject of excruciating, cruel, and inhumane torture for a year, Griffith is hardly recognizable and barely clinging to life. Following his rescue, Griffith attempts to commit suicide. When Griffith draws his own blood, he awakens his talisman, the Crimson Beherit, and triggers an event known as the Eclipse. It is during this eclipse that the birth of Femto—Griffith reincarnated as Satan spawn—and the rape of Casca occur.
The eclipse transports Griffith and the Band of the Hawk to a hellish astral plain occupied by devils and demons. The four satanic rulers of this realm, known as the God Hand, present Griffith with a Faustian bargain: in exchange for the lives of his comrades and closest friends, the God Hand will not only heal Griffith; through the blood of his comrades (literally), he will be reborn as the fifth member of the God Hand, Femto, and granted demonic power to establish dominion over all of earth.
Griffith hesitates to damn his comrades in exchange for power. The God Hand show Griffith a vision of all those he has slain to pave the path to the throne with their skulls. They assert that, because of his past wrongs, Griffith must continue wreaking havoc; there is no path to redemption so he must continue paving the road to hell. Believing grace and forgiveness inaccessible to him, Griffith chooses to continue along his path of depravity, cruelty, and evil. In the astral plain of the eclipse, Griffith sics monsters on the remaining members of the Band of the Hawk and, after his rebirth as Femto, rapes a tortured Casca in front of a severally wounded and restrained Guts. In physically and psychologically torturing his closest friends—his own rescuers—Griffith’s fall is complete. He is now no longer Griffith the anti-hero, but Femto, the rough hero (read: the villain-protagonist) of the “admirable devil” type described by A. W. Eaton in her essay, “Robust Immoralism.”
Berserk is a work of literature that deals in morality. That much is trivial. But what is the moral valence of the birth of Femto and rape of Casca? The intrinsic immorality of subject matter is obvious: murder and rape are wrong—they are the prototypes of Wrongness. The scene’s intrinsic and extrinsic moral valences are not congruent but inverted: the perspective of the implied author[1] is to regard Femto’s actions as the utmost evil; the intended audience is meant to regard them likewise, i.e., to be disgusted by the abhorrent acts of immorality perpetrated by an amoral psychopath.
Until the eclipse, Guts and Griffith were antiheroes; the duo fought ruthlessly, killing combatants as well as assassinating opponents—including innocents, accidentally—who threated Griffith’s ascension to dominion. The audience was intended to co-sign this Machiavellian amorality up to the final two episodes, putting us in the same place as Griffith, proto-antagonist, looking back at the mountains of bodies paving our pursuit to the castle in the clouds; if we excused all that evil, do we have the moral capital to sanction the sacrifice of our dearest allies, the rape of our most loyal friend, and the psychological scarring and physical mutilation of our one true friend[2]? We are left in the morally compromised position of Guts, confounded, and tortured by our own moral inconsistency.
Beserk does not conclude with an immoral message; it seduces[3] us, expertly, to adopt the amoral attitudes of Griffith, the deuteragonist (notably, not the protagonist), until we, like Guts (importantly, the protagonist), we must walk away from the Band of the Hawk, suffering inner turmoil for the actions performed—and attitudes earnestly if ephemerally held—in service thereto. In the final analysis, we are meant to identify with the morally flawed anti-hero of Guts; we are not intended to take up the cause of Femto, i.e., Griffith reborn physically and morally as a soulless devil. In fact, we are clearly meant to hate him, his works, and, like the Black Swordsman himself (Guts), oppose him and his atrocities.
Berserk’s lesson is not an immoral one but an eminently moral one: loyalty and dedication to a beautiful dream must not be allowed to supersede our duty to respect innocent individuals’ right to life. This moral education is not trivial but cognitively valuable insofar as the narrative trains the spirit not to go along with the immoral passions, which endorse absolute loyalty to oneself and one’s friends.[4]
I have defended the extrinsic morality of Berserk on the basis of the moral response it merits. I have also explained how its ethical elucidation is cognitively valuable, i.e., not trivial. What I have not yet done is articulated how Berserk’s laudable moral qualities contribute to its aesthetic appraisal. Now, I will.
I am of Leo Tolstoy’s view of aesthetic appreciation: Art, so properly called, is that which sincerely expresses the artist’s personal feelings on a given subject clearly such that the audience is moved to feel for himself the emotions of the artist.[5] Love or hate Berserk, few regard the work as failing on aesthetic grounds understood thusly; that is, I cannot imagine (nor have I come upon) anyone who contends Berserk is insufficiently evocative. To borrow from Plato, this is precisely the power and purpose of art: To make us feel a certain way, regardless of what our rational, intellectual assessment of those emotions may be. As Anthony O’Hear writes, “[a] child’s first consciousness is of pleasure and pain, and that this will be the basis on which the soul first acquires virtue or vice. Education is initially a matter of directing the child’s sentiments so that ‘even when young, and still incapable of rationally understanding why, he would rightly condemn and loathe contemptible things’ (Republic 402a).”[6] Art is the mode by which such intuitive moral education is conveyed to those incapable of reason—young children—and has the power to cloud the moral judgment even of those who possess this faculty—adults. Art achieves this not through intellection, which would presuppose a reasoning audience, but through affection, which operates on the passions.
Other standards of aesthetic evaluation must fail on the grounds that, besides evocative power, there is not a single formal feature shared by all nine muses[7]. Consider music and painting. Music is art just as much as painting. Yet, the two share no aesthetic standards of evaluation: the former is purely auditory and the latter all visual. They are categorically different. The only thing that unifies the set of all artworks lies not in their formal elements. They share not in material, efficient, nor formal causes; they share a final cause: Their telos is to produce an affective state in its intended audience. This conception of artworks nicely explains why we are right to reject the absurd claim of artistic autonomists who would claim that Duchamp’s Urinal is as much a work of art as Dante’s Inferno, Montaigne’s On Friendship, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Mahler and Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, John Williams’s Star Wars score (particularly Battle of the Heroes and Across the Stars), Alexandre Cabanel’s Fallen Angel, Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life, and, yes, Kentaro Miura’s Berserk.
Berserk is a work of art because it evokes a strong affective response. It is a good work of art because it succeeds in evoking a merited moral response of disapprobation of Femto’s rank Machiavellianism and heartfelt sympathy with those victims whom he most hurt: friends so beloved they might as well be family.
[1] Noël Carroll, “Moderate Moralism” (1996).
[2] The peculiar nature of Griffith’s Montaignian friendship with Guts demands its own essay. I have written about this very subject on my Substack twice, “Berserk: Dreams, Independence, and Friendship” and “Montaigne’s ‘On Friendship’: Part II.”
[3] Lionel Trilling’s review of 1958 review of Lolita.
[4] I am operating under the tripartite conception of the soul presented by Plato in Republic (375 B.C.).
[5] Leo Tolstoy, “What Is Art?” (1897).
[6] Anthony O’Hear’s lecture, “A Schooling in Goodness,” delivered at Dartmouth College on 10/02/23.
[7] Ibid. An oblique reference to O’Hear’s talk I nonetheless want to attribute.