The Illusion of Pure Reality: Nietzsche, Derrida, and the Case for Metaphorical Truth

I care about reality. AI art

Introduction

In a clip titled I Don’t Care About Jordan Peterson’s Metaphorical Truth, Matt Dillahunty, former host of The Atheist Experience, delivers a candid reflection on his encounter with Jordan Peterson. At one point, Dillahunty declares: “I don't care about metaphorical truths at all. I care about reality.”

What seems like a straightforward appeal to common sense is, on closer inspection, laden with philosophical assumptions. Dillahunty’s statement not only distances him from Peterson’s symbolic interpretations of religion, but also inadvertently invites scrutiny from thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, and Jacques Derrida. Their theories of language and meaning challenge the sharp divide Dillahunty posits between metaphor and reality, and reveal the fragility of this opposition.

Metaphorical Truth and Its Discontents

Jordan Peterson has often suggested that biblical narratives, while not literally factual, possess what he calls metaphorical truth. These stories, he argues, encode psychological or evolutionary insights that promote human flourishing, even if the events they describe never actually occurred.

This position frustrates empiricists like Sam Harris and Dillahunty, who insist that truth must correspond to objective, observable reality. The implication is clear: metaphor may inspire, but it must not be mistaken for reality.

Yet this insistence on separating truth from metaphor overlooks a deeper philosophical insight: language is metaphorical at its core, and “reality” is never encountered independently of linguistic mediation. Even the act of saying “I care about reality” is embedded in metaphor.

Nietzsche: Truth as a Forgotten Metaphor

Friedrich Nietzsche, in his early essay On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873/1990), dismantles the illusion that language can grant us access to things as they are. For Nietzsche, words are not neutral representations of reality but are “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms.” Truth, far from being a correspondence between word and world, is a socially sanctioned illusion hardened by custom and forgetfulness.

He writes: “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors... which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are” (Nietzsche, 1990, p. 84).

By this logic, Dillahunty’s invocation of “reality” relies on metaphorical constructs that have lost their visibility as metaphors. To “care about reality” presumes that reality is a stable object one can relate to emotionally—a metaphorical framing in itself.

Lakoff and Johnson: Living Inside Metaphor

While Nietzsche critiques the metaphysical underpinnings of truth, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson provide a cognitive and linguistic account of metaphor’s inescapability. In their seminal work Metaphors We Live By, they argue that metaphor is not merely decorative or literary but fundamental to how humans think, reason, and communicate.

They note that we do not merely describe disagreements in metaphorical terms; rather, we structure our understanding of arguments through metaphor. For example, the way we commonly talk about them—“Your claims are indefensible,” “He attacked every weak point,” “I demolished his argument”—reflects a deeply rooted conceptual metaphor: ARGUMENT IS WAR (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 4).

Dillahunty’s language—“I care about reality”—relies on similarly entrenched metaphors. “Caring” implies agency and affective engagement; “reality” is treated as a coherent object. Ironically, even his rejection of metaphor is couched in metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson would argue that his statement reveals a hidden metaphorical framework rather than transcending one.

Derrida: The Myth of Presence

Jacques Derrida, writing in the wake of Nietzsche, interrogates the desire for unmediated meaning—a desire he terms logocentrism. In Of Grammatology, Derrida critiques the assumption that language can grant access to an original presence or truth untainted by mediation.

He writes: “The outside maintains a relationship with the inside that, as always, is anything but a simple exteriority” (Derrida, 1976, p. 35). That is, there is no “pure” encounter with reality untouched by interpretation. The opposition between metaphor and literal truth is itself a construct that privileges a metaphysics of presence and suppresses the play of différance—Derrida’s term for the endless deferral and differentiation inherent in meaning.

From this vantage point, Dillahunty’s blunt dismissal of metaphorical truth reflects an unexamined metaphysical assumption: the belief in a reality that is immediately accessible, stable, and independent of interpretive structures.

Conclusion: The Limits of Literalism

Dillahunty’s frustration with metaphorical truth is understandable within the context of scientific skepticism and religious critique. But the outright rejection of metaphor as irrelevant to truth is philosophically untenable. Nietzsche, Lakoff & Johnson, and Derrida each show, in their own ways, that language never offers a direct pipeline to reality. Metaphor is not the enemy of truth—it is the condition of its articulation.

By insisting on a truth purified of metaphor, Dillahunty inadvertently perpetuates a metaphysical stance his own tradition of secular rationalism ought to challenge. His declaration—“I don’t care about metaphorical truths at all. I care about reality”—repeats the very gesture that philosophy has taught us to be suspicious of: mistaking the metaphor of reality for reality itself.

References

Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1990). On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense. In D. Breazeale (Ed.), Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s (pp. 79–97). Humanities Press. (Original work published 1873)

Pangburn Philosophy. (n.d.). I Don’t Care About Jordan Peterson’s Metaphorical Truth! Matt Dillahunty [YouTube video].