Can Philosophy Leave Metaphor Behind? Derrida and the Problem of Proper Meaning

Introduction — A Question About Philosophical Language

A metaphor can help us express an idea by making it more accessible or vivid. We generally assume that the figurative expression can be distinguished from the meaning it conveys, so that once the idea has been understood, the metaphor can be set aside without losing anything essential.

Earlier discussions have approached this problem from different directions: Nietzsche questioned the relation between language and conceptual formation, Lakoff and Johnson examined how metaphors organize thought, and a preceding article explored what remains when a metaphor becomes a concept. In White Mythology, Jacques Derrida examines the assumptions underlying the distinction between figurative expression and conceptual meaning.

The distinction between metaphorical expression and proper meaning rests on the premise that philosophy can separate the two with some degree of certainty. Derrida examines this belief through an image that seems to illustrate the passage from one to the other: a worn coin whose original inscription has disappeared.

1. The Worn Coin: The Appeal of an Original Meaning

In The Garden of Epicurus, Anatole France compares metaphysicians to knife-grinders who polish coins until their inscriptions disappear. The image suggests that abstract concepts emerge through a process in which something concrete gradually loses its original form. A word may begin with a sensible meaning, acquire figurative uses, and eventually function as an abstract term whose origins have become difficult to recognize. Derrida takes up this account to examine the assumptions it makes about the history of philosophical language.

The French word usure introduces an additional complication, since it can mean both wear and usury. France does not use the word in this passage; Derrida draws on its double meaning to complicate the image. Wear suggests the loss of an original inscription, whereas usury evokes an economic process involving circulation and the generation of value. The association makes it harder to describe metaphorical history simply as the disappearance of an image, since the process may involve transformations that cannot be adequately captured by the language of loss alone.

The difficulty lies in the assumption that the original meaning remains recoverable beneath subsequent uses. In the dialogue, Polyphilos presents the disappearance of sensible associations as part of the movement through which philosophical thought arrives at abstract meaning. Derrida draws attention to the distinction between the sensible and the conceptual that this account presupposes, inviting us to examine whether the history of a word can really be understood as a passage from an original, proper meaning to its later transformations.

2. The Problem of the Proper: Why Origins Are Not Enough

Reconstructing the history of a word may reveal associations that have become difficult to recognize, but it does not establish that its earliest meaning was more authentic than its later uses. Derrida questions the narrative in which language begins with sensible expressions and gradually develops into abstract philosophical concepts. Such an account already relies on a distinction between the physical and the metaphysical, even though this opposition belongs to the philosophical tradition whose history it is supposed to explain (Derrida, 1974, pp. 7–8).

There is also a difference between tracing a term's history and explaining its role within a philosophical argument. A concept acquires significance through its relations to other concepts, the distinctions it establishes, and the problems it helps articulate. Its earlier associations may illuminate these functions, but they cannot determine them in advance. Even a convincing account of a word's origin leaves open the question of how it operates within a particular conceptual context.

Historical inquiry remains valuable because it can make familiar expressions strange again, bringing neglected assumptions into view. The difficulty arises when an origin is treated as a final criterion for separating proper meaning from figurative development. Establishing how a concept emerged does not, by itself, tell us whether its present meaning can be separated from the history through which it developed. The problem therefore extends beyond the reconstruction of individual words to the principles by which metaphor itself is defined.

3. The Metaphor of Metaphor: Can Philosophy Classify Its Own Language?

A general theory of metaphor might seem to provide the necessary criteria. By defining metaphor and identifying its characteristic features, we could distinguish figurative expressions from proper meanings and examine their roles in philosophical discourse. Such a procedure, however, depends on the assumption that the distinction it employs can be adequately established before it is applied.

For Derrida, the concept of metaphor belongs to the philosophical vocabulary it is supposed to help us analyze. Its traditional definition relies on distinctions between the proper and the figurative, the sensible and the intelligible, and thought and language. These distinctions have developed within the history of philosophy, raising a question about the status of the categories through which that history is interpreted (Derrida, 1974, pp. 22–23).

This is the difficulty suggested by the metaphor of metaphor. A theory must explain what makes an expression metaphorical, yet its explanation relies on conceptual distinctions that already determine how metaphor is understood. Applying the definition more consistently cannot, by itself, settle the issue, since the question concerns the terms in which the definition has been formulated. An account of metaphor must therefore reckon with its own participation in the language it examines.

This does not mean that conceptual distinctions are useless or that philosophical analysis must abandon precision. It means that a classification of metaphors cannot simply assume that its categories are independent of the history and discourse under investigation. The difficulty lies in establishing a definitive boundary between figurative expression and proper meaning when the concepts used to draw that boundary are themselves part of the philosophical tradition being examined. Derrida's analysis thus turns our attention from the identification of individual metaphors to the conditions under which the distinction becomes possible.

4. Two Ways of Bringing Metaphor to an End

In his concluding discussion, Derrida examines two movements through which metaphor appears to reach its end. In the first, the figurative detour is incorporated into a philosophical movement towards truth. What initially appears as a transfer of meaning becomes a stage in the recovery of a proper sense, allowing philosophy to appropriate the conceptual content that metaphor was thought to convey. Derrida relates this movement to the logic of Aufhebung, in which what is overcome is also retained within a higher conceptual unity (Derrida, 1974, pp. 67–68).

Within this account, metaphor can be treated as provisional because its contribution is supposedly preserved in the meaning that philosophy recovers. Once its content has been incorporated into conceptual thought, the figurative expression appears to have fulfilled its purpose. The movement brings metaphor to an end by subordinating it to a truth that can ultimately be recognized as proper to thought.

The second movement raises a different possibility. The generalization of metaphor need not culminate in the recovery of proper meaning; it may instead make the opposition between the figurative and the proper increasingly difficult to maintain. Derrida's discussion turns to the resistance of syntax to its subordination to semantic content, suggesting that linguistic relations can produce effects that exceed the meaning philosophical discourse seeks to establish (Derrida, 1974, pp. 68–71).

These movements should not be reduced to a choice between recovering an original meaning and declaring everything metaphorical. They indicate different ways in which the relation between language and conceptual thought becomes problematic: one seeks to incorporate metaphor into a proper order of meaning, while the other unsettles the opposition that would make such incorporation definitive. The implications extend beyond the fate of individual figures of speech to the status of philosophy's own claims to universality.

5. White Mythology: When an Idiom Becomes Universal Reason

The title White Mythology gives the argument its broader historical significance. Derrida suggests that Western metaphysics has tended to efface the traces of the figurative and linguistic history involved in the formation of its concepts. Its vocabulary can consequently appear to express universal Reason, even though it belongs to a particular linguistic and intellectual tradition. The image of writing in white ink captures this paradox: the traces remain, but they have become difficult to recognize beneath the apparently neutral surface of philosophical discourse (Derrida, 1974, p. 11).

Derrida's examples include theory, foundation, and concept. The first evokes a relation to seeing, the second draws on the image of a supporting ground, and the third is associated with the gesture of grasping or taking hold of something (Derrida, 1974, pp. 22–23). These associations do not make the terms unusable, nor do they show that philosophical reasoning is merely disguised imagery. They indicate how a vocabulary shaped by sensible and spatial relations can become part of the language through which abstract thought organizes its objects, arguments, and claims to knowledge.

The issue concerns the authority claimed for this vocabulary. When the history of its formation recedes from view, the conceptual language of a particular tradition may appear to express the necessary form of reason itself. Derrida's analysis invites us to examine how this claim to universality is established, without suggesting that identifying a metaphorical association is enough to invalidate a concept or settle the question of its truth. What is at stake is the relation between the historical conditions of philosophical thought and its claim to speak beyond them.

Conclusion — Can Philosophy Declare Metaphor Finished?

The worn coin seemed to illustrate a straightforward history: a metaphor loses its original image, leaving behind a proper meaning that philosophy can recover. Derrida complicates this account by questioning whether the origin, the figurative transformation, and the conceptual result can be clearly distinguished in the first place.

The issue extends beyond identifying which philosophical concepts contain metaphors. It is how philosophy establishes the distinction that allows it to identify metaphor, separate it from proper meaning, and declare its work finished.

The difficulty lies in determining whether that boundary can be treated as independent of the language and history through which it is drawn.

References

Derrida, J. (1974). White mythology: Metaphor in the text of philosophy (F. C. T. Moore, Trans.). New Literary History, 6(1), 5–74. https://tfreeman.net/resources/Phil-480/derrida-white-mythology.pdf

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1999). On truth and lies in a nonmoral sense (D. Breazeale, Trans.). In D. Breazeale (Ed.), Philosophy and truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s notebooks of the early 1870s (pp. 79–97). Humanities Press. (Original work written 1873)