The death of God in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Shadow”

Abstract

The scholar writes “about what was true in the world, and about what was good, and what was pretty”, later “about the True, the Good and the Beautiful”, but these wordings are not synonymous. They mirror the distinction in logic between extension and intension. This split reveals itself when the princess examines the scholar, who is a philosopher, in subjects that are true according to the sciences. I argue that the scholar’s shadow becomes The Shadow inside a stratification of existence, inspired by Plato and used in “The Little Mermaid”, as it ascends from the lower to the higher world. In “the anteroom of Poetry” the shadow becomes a “human being”, and the world that subsequently opens to it is identical to the human world packed with those things that count as factual, efficient and appropriate. With Heidegger I interpret the downthrow of the ideals as the “upheaval” of the ego. In confronting the reception of the tale, I show how “a sort of twilight” in the anteroom is decisive: here things are transformed into their opposites. Finally, I suggest why a shadow is prone to perform such a reversal which anticipates Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values.