What Happens When a Metaphor Becomes a Concept?

Introduction

Some philosophical terms become so familiar that we no longer notice the images they contain. We encounter them as established concepts, equipped with recognisable theoretical functions, without considering how an image might have helped make those functions intelligible. Constellation offers a revealing example. The word can designate a way of understanding relations among elements, yet it retains the image of stars whose arrangement allows us to perceive a figure. When the term enters philosophical discourse, does the image become dispensable, or does something of its organising force remain?

The question concerns how concepts acquire their apparent solidity. Once a term becomes part of an established vocabulary, the processes that made its meaning intelligible can recede from view. We continue to use the concept even as the conditions that shaped it become less apparent. Examining this relationship may reveal how concepts direct thought and how familiar ways of understanding acquire their authority.

A metaphor can disappear from view without disappearing from thought. To understand how this happens, we need to consider both the role of metaphor in conceptual formation and the possibility that its effects persist after the original image has ceased to attract attention.

1. The Metaphor Comes First

Nietzsche: From Transfer to Concept

Nietzsche's On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense offers a radical starting point because it locates metaphorical transfer before the familiar distinction between literal and figurative language. He describes a sequence in which a nerve stimulus is translated into an image and the image, in turn, into a sound. Each transition crosses between different orders of experience and expression. As Nietzsche puts it, “A nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor.”

The significance of this sequence lies in the transformations themselves. A sound does not reproduce a nerve stimulus as though both belonged to the same medium, nor does the image simply duplicate the stimulus that occasioned it. Something passes between heterogeneous domains, acquiring a different form in the process. Nietzsche thereby challenges the assumption that language provides direct access to things as they are. What becomes expressible already depends on a process of translation.

His account of concept formation extends this argument. A concept emerges when a word is applied to different instances whose particular differences are disregarded in favour of a common designation. Nietzsche calls this operation the “equation of unequal things.” Individual leaves, for example, differ in countless ways, yet the concept leaf allows us to treat them as instances of the same kind. Classification depends on selecting certain features as relevant while setting others aside.

Once different instances have been gathered under a common name, the concept can appear to identify a unity already present in the things themselves. The selective act through which that unity was established becomes difficult to see, and a way of organising experience can seem like a straightforward description of reality. The concept's apparent stability conceals the process through which differences were subordinated to a common identity.

Nietzsche's analysis thus draws attention to a tension within conceptual thought: the operation that makes recognition possible can also obscure how the recognised identity was established. It raises the possibility that what seems self-evident in a concept may depend on processes that its established meaning no longer makes apparent.

2. When Metaphor Becomes Invisible

Lakoff and Johnson: From Language to Everyday Thought

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Metaphors We Live By approach the problem from a different direction. Rather than examining the transfers and abstractions involved in conceptual formation, they investigate how metaphor organises ordinary thought and action. Their central claim is that metaphor extends beyond the expressions we use: we understand one domain of experience partly through patterns drawn from another.

Consider the metaphor TIME IS MONEY. Expressions such as save time, waste time, spend time and invest time are commonplace. Speakers do not ordinarily need to picture money when using them, yet the expressions belong to a broader conceptual pattern in which time is treated as a resource that can be allocated, spent or lost. This pattern influences more than vocabulary. It encourages us to evaluate time in terms of efficiency, expenditure and opportunity cost, making certain ways of thinking about it readily available.

The metaphor's familiarity helps explain its effectiveness. Because its expressions are conventional, the underlying mapping rarely requires conscious attention. It can shape how we assess activities and make decisions without presenting itself as an image we have deliberately chosen. The metaphor has become part of the ordinary framework through which experience is interpreted.

The distinction from Nietzsche is important. His analysis examines the transformations and acts of abstraction involved in conceptual formation; Lakoff and Johnson show how metaphorical patterns continue to organise experience without being consciously recognised. The first directs attention to the formation of conceptual identity, while the second reveals how metaphor can remain active within familiar habits of thought.

This possibility extends beyond everyday language. A metaphor may help make a theoretical problem intelligible and then become so familiar within the resulting vocabulary that its original image recedes. Constellation offers a case in which we can examine what such a metaphor contributes to philosophical thinking.

3. The Constellation

Saussure: Making Relations Intelligible

In his discussion of associative relations, Ferdinand de Saussure describes enseignement as “the centre of a constellation” in which other coordinated terms converge. The image gives spatial form to a principle of linguistic analysis: a term's value depends on its relations to other terms rather than on a self-contained content it possesses in isolation.

A constellation makes this dependence easier to grasp. A centre occupies a position within a field, while other elements become relevant through their associations and differences. The figure emerges from their arrangement; an element's place matters because of the configuration to which it belongs. The image gives a recognisable form to a principle that would otherwise remain abstract.

Some metaphors illustrate an idea that can be formulated independently of them; others help make an idea thinkable by giving its relations a form we can grasp. Saussure's constellation belongs to the latter category. We can explain associative relations without invoking the heavens, but the image helps us understand how the significance of a term depends on its place within a network of associations.

The metaphor here makes a relational structure available to thought without claiming that linguistic relations are themselves spatial objects. Its function is to clarify how a term becomes significant through its connections with others.

Adorno: From Image to Philosophical Method

In Theodor W. Adorno, the constellation acquires a more explicitly philosophical function. It becomes a way of arranging concepts so that an object can be approached through the relations among its different determinations, rather than being subsumed under a single definition. The issue now concerns the limits of conceptual identification: what happens when the characteristics through which we identify an object fail to capture everything that matters about it?

A concept makes an object recognisable by selecting characteristics that distinguish it from other objects. Yet the object may possess determinations that this act of identification leaves out. Adorno's constellation offers a way to approach it through several related concepts, allowing their connections to disclose aspects that none could adequately capture alone.

Consider the concept of modern work. We might examine it through labour, wages, commodities, production, leisure, unemployment, time and exploitation. Each concept reveals a particular dimension, but none provides an exhaustive account. Labour acquires a different significance when considered in relation to wages and the commodity form; leisure looks different when placed alongside working time and unemployment. Their arrangement brings into view connections that disappear when each concept is considered separately.

A constellation therefore does not provide a more comprehensive definition under which every determination can be collected. It changes how the object can be understood by arranging concepts so that their differences and connections become consequential. The object can be approached from several directions without being reduced to a single conceptual identity.

The astronomical metaphor helps clarify this procedure: stars form a recognisable figure through their arrangement, although the figure is not another star added to them. Likewise, a philosophical constellation makes an object intelligible through the relations among its conceptual determinations. The theoretical force of Adorno's method lies in how concepts are selected, related and brought to bear on the object.

Saussure and Adorno thus give the constellation distinct functions. Saussure uses the image to clarify the relational character of linguistic value; Adorno turns constellation into a method for approaching objects through the relations among concepts. In the first case, the metaphor helps explain a theoretical principle. In the second, it informs a practice of philosophical inquiry. The image does not simply illustrate the method from the outside; it helps make its organising principle intelligible.

4. What Remains When the Metaphor Disappears?

The movement from Saussure to Adorno suggests that something more than an image may survive when a metaphor becomes a theoretical term. Once constellation functions as a philosophical concept, we no longer need to picture stars in order to use it. Yet the relational pattern made intelligible by the image continues to shape what the concept asks us to see.

This changes the problem. The issue is not whether we can recover the original image by an act of interpretation, as though the metaphor were a historical object that had simply been forgotten. What matters is what happens when the image recedes while its organising force remains. A metaphor can cease to appear metaphorical and still influence how relations are conceived, which features become salient and how an object can be approached.

This also explains why the history of a metaphor does not by itself invalidate the concept that emerges from it. Knowing that constellation is an image drawn from the arrangement of stars does not tell us whether Adorno's use of the term is philosophically adequate. The historical origin and the theoretical force of a concept are different questions.

What the history makes visible, however, is that a concept may acquire its stability by concealing some of the movement through which it became intelligible. The metaphor disappears as an image, but what it made possible may remain within the conceptual form.

5. Can Philosophy Separate Metaphor from Concept?

Jacques Derrida's “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” takes this problem further by questioning the distinction between metaphorical expression and conceptual language itself. Philosophical discourse often treats metaphor as something that can assist thought at an early stage and then disappear once a concept has acquired a precise meaning. Derrida asks whether this division can be sustained as securely as philosophy assumes.

The difficulty is not simply that philosophical concepts have metaphorical histories. A more fundamental problem arises if the language through which philosophy articulates concepts is itself shaped by transfers, substitutions and figures whose effects cannot be completely separated from conceptual meaning. Here, however, metaphor should not be understood narrowly as a figure of speech. For Derrida, it also involves movements of transfer, displacement and translation, including processes that take place within language itself. The metaphor, in its broader sense, may disappear from view without leaving the conceptual language that it helped organise.

This does not imply that concepts are merely disguised metaphors or that philosophical distinctions have no validity. Derrida's point is more disruptive: philosophy cannot easily occupy a position outside figurative language from which it could identify metaphor, extract its conceptual content and declare the metaphor finished.

Seen from this perspective, the constellation is more than an example of a metaphor becoming a concept. It reveals a broader difficulty. The image can recede while the structure it made intelligible continues to organise thought, and philosophy may have no simple criterion for deciding when that figurative contribution has finally been left behind.

Conclusion

What Remains Unseen

A metaphor does not cease to matter simply because we stop experiencing it as a metaphor. Nietzsche shows how metaphorical transfer precedes the apparent stability of conceptual language; Lakoff and Johnson show how metaphor can organise thought after its figurative character has become ordinary; Saussure and Adorno show how constellation can make relations intelligible and eventually function as a philosophical method.

The deeper issue is what happens in the transition itself. When a metaphor becomes a concept, the image may recede from view while the organisation of thought it helped establish remains. Derrida's intervention makes this harder to treat as a simple historical process, because the distinction between figurative and conceptual language may itself be less secure than philosophy assumes.

The important question, then, is not simply where a concept came from. It is what disappears when its metaphor becomes invisible—and what continues to shape thought after that disappearance.

A metaphor can disappear from view without disappearing from thought. What becomes invisible may still determine what becomes intelligible.

References

Adorno, T. W. (1973). Negative dialectics (E. B. Ashton, Trans.). Continuum. (Original work published 1966)

Culler, J. (1976). Saussure. Fontana/Collins.

Derrida, J. (1982). White mythology: Metaphor in the text of philosophy. In Margins of philosophy (A. Bass, Trans., pp. 207–271). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1972)

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

Nietzsche, F. (1999). On truth and lies in an extra-moral sense. In D. Breazeale (Ed. & Trans.), Philosophy and truth: Selections from Nietzsche's notebooks of the early 1870s (pp. 79–91). Humanities Press. (Original work written 1873)

Saussure, F. de. (2011). Course in general linguistics (W. Baskin, Trans.; P. Meisel & H. Saussy, Eds.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1916)