Berserk: Dreams, Independence, and Friendship
Exploring Griffith's conception of the ideal friend.
If you’ve been reading my Substack for a while, my interest in formally understanding platonic and romantic love is apparent. This post will constitute yet another meditation on this theme. Past posts have been inspired by Descartes, Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and The Banshees of Inisherin. Today I will be unpacking Griffith’s soliloquy on friendship from the 1997 anime, Berserk. I recommend watching the whole four-minute scene in its entirety before you continue reading.
Griffith believes that true friendship can only exist between equals. A crucial component of this equality is that both friends must possess their own dreams independent of each other. To Griffith, “a true friend never relies on another’s dream. The man who would be [his] friend must have his own reason for living, beyond [him].”
What is this "dream” that is so crucial to Griffith’s conception of friendship? A dream is that most “precious” thing that men “are drive to pursue… for their own sake, no other.” In essence, a man’s dream is his personal telos, his final cause, that ultimate good that “smolder[s] deep in [his] heart” and “breathe[s] life into [him].” By defining dreams in this idiosyncratic, individualistic manner, Griffith delineates followers from friends. “Dedicated comrades who sacrifice themselves for [another’s] dream… does not make them friends.” Those men who latch onto another man’s dream in lieu of their own are not merely incapable of true friendship but, in essence, “are dead, for they have no dreams.”
While Griffith’s understanding of individuality, purpose, and friendship may sound exacting, it is equally compelling. Perhaps I’m drawn to it because it reminds me of Ayn Rand’s egoistic conception of friendship as “travelers [who] choose to share [their] journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction”1 If friendship were instead to consist of one traveler changing his destination—his dream—to match the other’s, what would remain to befriend? Nothing. For, if it is true that a man’s purpose is his most essential feature, then to mutilate, distort, or destroy one’s purpose to match another’s is to fundamentally annihilate oneself.
If the reader believes he has a more precise, accurate, or otherwise superior understanding of friendship, I encourage him to comment below or email me at: nicastroj.23@dartmouth.edu.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957).