What is metaphor and how does our mind use it?

From Warmth to a Life Plan:

How Metaphors Are Formed and Climb a Conceptual Hierarchy

Lakoff and Johnson, with a Note on Ayn Rand

September 2026

I. The Question

Lakoff and Johnson’s central claim is easy to state and easy to misunderstand. Metaphor is not a flourish added after thought is finished. It is one of the ways thought gets built. “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”[1] The present essay stays with the mechanics. How, on their account, does a metaphor get created in a human mind? How do the simplest of those creations, tied to ordinary bodily scenes, combine into mappings that organize highly abstract concepts—life, love, career, theory—higher in a conceptual hierarchy? Concrete examples will carry the argument. A final section asks whether Ayn Rand assigns metaphor a similar constitutive role in epistemology, psychology, or ethics. She does not. She gives adjacent phenomena—concretization in art, sense of life, hierarchy by abstraction from abstractions—a related job without making metaphor the engine of abstract concepts.

II. How a Primary Metaphor Is Made

The later theory, assembled in Philosophy in the Flesh from Christopher Johnson’s work on conflation and Joseph Grady’s work on primary metaphor, is a developmental story.[2] A young child does not first possess two cleanly separated domains and then compare them. In repeated everyday scenes, a subjective experience and a sensorimotor experience occur together so regularly that, for a time, they are not distinguished. Associations form automatically. Later the child can tell the domains apart, but the association remains as a mapping: the sensorimotor structure can be used to reason about the subjective one. That mapping is a primary metaphor. It is not invented by a poet. It is learned by a body that lives through the same pairing hundreds of times.

More is up

Pour water into a glass. The level rises. Add books to a pile. The pile grows taller. Pour from the glass or take books off the pile. The level falls. Quantity and verticality are not the same thing. In these scenes they arrive together. During the period of conflation, “more” and “up” are not held apart. After they are distinguished, the association remains. One can then say, of things that do not literally rise, “prices went up,” “crime is down,” “turn the volume up,” “her fever spiked.” Verticality is the source. Quantity is the target. The mapping is MORE IS UP / LESS IS DOWN.[3]

Lakoff later adds a neural rationale for the direction. The brain is always computing verticality and not always computing quantity, so activation flows more regularly from the verticality system toward quantity than the reverse. The source is the domain that is more constantly computed.[4] The child does not decide this. The pairing in the world, plus the wiring that records co-occurrence, decides it.

Affection is warmth

An infant held close feels both affection and bodily warmth. The two are not first sorted into an inner feeling and an outer temperature. They arrive as one scene. Later they can be named separately, but the link remains. A person can be “warm,” a welcome can be “frosty,” a relation can “cool.” Temperature is the source. Affection is the target. The mapping is AFFECTION IS WARMTH.[5] Nothing in the physics of love requires this. What requires it is the infant’s actual environment: care comes with contact, and contact comes with heat.

Knowing is seeing

For a sighted child, getting information about nearby objects is, over and over, a matter of looking. Seeing and knowing co-occur. Later one can know without looking, but the mapping stays: “I see what you mean,” “that’s a bright idea,” “I’m in the dark,” “look at the problem from another angle.” Vision is the source. Knowledge is the target.

Purposes are destinations

To get a drink, a child walks to the water. Reaching the place and achieving the purpose happen as one episode. After the domains separate, purpose can be thought with the structure of motion-to-a-place: “he isn’t there yet,” “we’ve reached our goal,” “she has a long way to go.” Destinations are the source. Purposes are the target.[6]

Four features are shared. The source has image content—height, heat, sight, walking. The target is a subjective judgment or an abstract relation—quantity, affection, knowledge, purpose—that does not come with its own rich image.[7] The pairing is a correlation in a primary scene, not a noticed resemblance between two already separate things. The mapping is directional. We do not ordinarily say that a pile of books is affectionate because it is high. And the process is automatic. No one sits a toddler down to teach MORE IS UP.

III. How Primary Metaphors Combine

Primary metaphors are, in Grady’s image, atomic. Complex metaphors are molecular. They are bindings of several primary mappings, often plus a piece of ordinary knowledge or a cultural assumption, into one larger structure that can organize a whole abstract domain.[8]

Theories are buildings

A theory is not a building. Yet English speakers say that a theory has a foundation, that an argument is shaky, that a framework collapsed, that someone demolished a position, that a claim cannot support the weight placed on it. The complex mapping THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS is not one primary metaphor. It draws on PHYSICAL STRUCTURE IS ABSTRACT STRUCTURE, PERSISTING IS REMAINING ERECT, and ORGANIZATION IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE, themselves grounded in the experience of things that stand up only if their lower parts hold. The particular measurements of brick and beam are dropped. What is kept is a logic: if the base goes, the rest goes; if the parts do not fit, the whole is weak.[9]

A purposeful life is a journey

This is the example Lakoff and Johnson work out most carefully, and it shows the climb from a bodily scene to an ethical-psychological abstraction.[10]

Start with two primary metaphors already formed: PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS and ACTIONS ARE MOTIONS. Add a piece of ordinary knowledge: a long trip to a series of destinations is a journey. Add, in their telling, a cultural assumption: people are supposed to have purposes in life. Bind these together. The result is a complex mapping:

A purposeful life is a journey.

A person living a life is a traveler.

Life goals are destinations.

A life plan is an itinerary.

Once the complex is in place, a large field of inferences becomes available without further invention. If you have no purpose, you are “lost” or “without direction.” If you change aims, you “change course.” If progress is slow, you are “stuck.” If you meet an obstacle, something is “in your way.” If you succeed, you “arrive.” None of those phrases is a new metaphor. Each is a consequence of the binding.

IV. Hierarchy: How the Mapping Climbs

Complex metaphors do not sit in a flat list. They inherit structure from more general mappings above them. Lakoff calls this an inheritance hierarchy.[11]

At the most general level is the Event Structure Metaphor. Events are understood in terms of space. States are locations (“I’m in trouble”). Changes are movements (“he went from bad to worse”). Causes are forces. Purposes are destinations. Means are paths. Difficulties are impediments to motion. Long-term purposeful activities are journeys.

One level down, a purposeful life is a special case of a long-term purposeful activity. A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY therefore inherits the whole event-structure mapping, with events specified as significant life events and purposes specified as life goals. “He got a head start in life” is not a free-standing idiom. It is event structure applied to a biography.

One level further down, particular long-term projects inherit from life-as-journey. LOVE IS A JOURNEY and A CAREER IS A JOURNEY take the same skeleton and fill the roles differently. In love, the travelers are the lovers, the vehicle is the relationship, the destinations are shared goals. That is why two people can be “at a crossroads,” “spinning their wheels,” “off the track,” or “on the rocks.”[12] The vehicle words—car, train, boat, plane—are basic-level fillings of a superordinate role. The mapping itself sits higher than any one of them. In a career, the traveler is the worker, the path is the profession, the destination is advancement. One “climbs the ladder,” “hits a ceiling,” or “goes nowhere.”

The hierarchy can be read from the bottom up as well. A child first lives the primary scenes: walking to what is wanted, watching a pile grow, being held. Those scenes leave primary metaphors. The primary metaphors combine. The combinations inherit a general event structure and then specialize into life, love, and work. Abstract thought, on this account, is not a leap out of the body. It is the same bodily structure reused at a higher tier, with particular measurements of walking, stacking, and being held omitted, and with new role-fillers supplied.

What is gained at each climb is inferential power. What is lost, as Lakoff and Johnson have always insisted, is completeness. A metaphor highlights some structure and hides the rest.[13] LIFE IS A JOURNEY makes direction, progress, and obstacle salient. It hides the respects in which a life is not a trip: it has no single ticket, no guaranteed station, no luggage rack. THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS makes support and collapse salient. It hides the respects in which a theory is a set of claims, not a load-bearing wall. The hierarchy organizes thought. It does not photograph the target.

V. Does Rand Give Metaphor This Role?

She does not. The point can be stated without hostility and without forcing her into their vocabulary.

In Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, abstract concepts are formed by measurement-omission. One isolates units that share a distinguishing characteristic, retains the characteristic, and omits particular measure. Higher-level concepts are abstractions from abstractions, still answerable to a chain that terminates in percepts.[14] Language completes the concept by giving it a word. Definition states the essence. Metaphor is not a stage in that sequence. A child forms length from sticks of different measure, not by mapping verticality onto quantity. A child forms table from similar objects, not by treating a table as a building or a journey. The hierarchy in her theory is a hierarchy of increasing abstraction over the same kind of integration, not a hierarchy of inherited source-domain structure.

She knows that consciousness needs concretes. That is why she treats art as a psycho-epistemological necessity. Art “brings man’s concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts.”[15] The direction is the reverse of Lakoff and Johnson’s. They start from a bodily concrete and project it upward to structure an abstraction. She starts from an abstraction that has already been formed and embodies it downward so that a limited focus can hold it. Concretization is not metaphor-as-concept-formation. It is a later aid to a mind that already has the concept and cannot keep the full sum in view.

Sense of life is the nearest psychological analogue to their pre-conceptual layer. It is “a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence,” formed by a process she compares to a subconscious counterpart of abstraction.[16] It organizes what feels important before it is named. That is a gestalt-like, automatic integration. It is not a mapping from warmth to affection or from paths to purposes. It classifies and integrates value-responses. It does not borrow the inferential structure of a source domain.

In ethics the divergence is sharp. Rationality, productiveness, justice, and pride are defined as recognitions of facts about existence and consciousness, and as policies of action based on those recognitions.[17] A life with purpose is, for her, a life whose actions are chosen by a focused mind in the service of survival and happiness. It is not, officially, a journey-mapping inherited from event structure. One may speak of a career as a path. She does so in fiction constantly.[18] The speech is communication. It is not the theory of how the concept career or purpose was formed.

A limited concession is fair. Measurement-omission and metaphorical projection both drop particularity and keep a structure that can travel. Both let a mind hold more than the present scene. Both produce hierarchies. If one reads “source domain” as a first-level structured experience and “target” as a higher-level concept, the climb from being held to “a warm person,” or from walking to the water to “she isn’t there yet,” looks like a cousin of abstraction from abstractions. The cousinhood stops at the criterion of sameness. For Rand, what is kept must be a characteristic of the units themselves. For Lakoff and Johnson, what is kept may be a structure borrowed from a different kind of thing. That is the difference between identifying affection and understanding affection as heat. She allows the second as rhetoric. She does not allow it as the method by which the first is known.

VI. Conclusion

On Lakoff and Johnson’s account, a metaphor is created when a bodily scene repeatedly binds a sensorimotor experience to a subjective one, the two are later distinguished, and the binding remains as a mapping. MORE IS UP comes from piles and glasses. AFFECTION IS WARMTH comes from being held. KNOWING IS SEEING comes from looking in order to find out. PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS comes from walking to what one wants. Those primary mappings combine. THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS and A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY are molecules built from atoms plus ordinary knowledge. The molecules inherit a still more general event structure and then specialize into love and career. At each level the mind gains a way to reason about what would otherwise be too thin to hold. At each level something in the target is hidden.

Rand describes a different climb: percept to first-level concept to abstraction from abstraction, by omitted measurements, completed by a word and a definition. Metaphor is not the mechanism. Art concretizes abstractions after they exist. Sense of life integrates value before it is named. Ethics identifies facts and adopts policies. She can use a journey-sentence about a life. She does not treat the journey as what the concept of a life is made of.

The two programs therefore answer different questions about the same human habit of speaking. Why do we say that prices rise, that a person is warm, that a theory collapsed, that two lovers are on the rocks, that a career has hit a ceiling? Lakoff and Johnson answer: because the mind built those abstract domains out of older bodily ones. Rand answers: because a conceptual being, already in possession of the relevant concepts, may use a concrete image to hold or to show what the concept already contains. Both answers can be true of the sentence. Only one of them is a theory of how the concept itself came to be.

Works Cited

Grady, Joseph. “Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphors and Primary Scenes.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1997.

Grady, Joseph. “Primary Metaphors as Inputs to Conceptual Integration.” Journal of Pragmatics 37 (2005): 1595–1614.

Lakoff, George. “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.” In Metaphor and Thought, edited by Andrew Ortony, 2nd ed., 202–251. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Lakoff, George. “Mapping the Brain’s Metaphor Circuitry: Metaphorical Thought in Everyday Reason.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (2014): 958.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Rand, Ayn. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd ed. Edited by Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff. New York: Meridian, 1990.

Rand, Ayn. “Art and Sense of Life.” In The Romantic Manifesto, 25–33. New York: Signet, 1971.

Rand, Ayn. “The Objectivist Ethics.” In The Virtue of Selfishness, 13–35. New York: Signet, 1964.

Rand, Ayn. “The Psycho-Epistemology of Art.” In The Romantic Manifesto, 15–24. New York: Signet, 1971.

[1]George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 3–6.

[2]George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 46–59, incorporating Christopher Johnson’s theory of conflation and Joseph Grady’s theory of primary metaphor. See Joseph Grady, “Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphors and Primary Scenes” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1997).

[3]Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 50–54; Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 14–17.

[4]Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 50; George Lakoff, “Mapping the Brain’s Metaphor Circuitry,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (2014): 958.

[5]Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 48; Philosophy in the Flesh, 53–54.

[6]Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 52–54. Primary experience: reaching a destination in everyday life and thereby achieving a purpose, as when one walks to a water cooler to get a drink.

[7]Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 45–47. Primary metaphors pair a sensorimotor source that has “image content” with a subjective target that has “response content.” See Joseph Grady, “Primary Metaphors as Inputs to Conceptual Integration,” Journal of Pragmatics 37 (2005): 1595–1614.

[8]Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 60–73.

[9]Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 46–51.

[10]Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 60–63.

[11]George Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 202–251, on inheritance hierarchies.

[12]Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 44–45, 87–96. The lovers are travelers; the relationship is a vehicle; common goals are destinations.

[13]Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 10–13, 52–55, 147–155.

[14]Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, expanded 2nd ed. (New York: Meridian, 1990), 10–15, 29–38.

[15]Ayn Rand, “The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” in The Romantic Manifesto (New York: Signet, 1971), 19–20.

[16]Ayn Rand, “Art and Sense of Life,” in The Romantic Manifesto, 25–33: a sense of life is “a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence.”

[17]Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet, 1964), 25–28.

[18]Rand’s fiction and nonfiction are dense with metaphor—Atlas, the motor of the world, the sanction of the victim—but these are instruments of communication and dramatization. They are not offered as the mechanism by which the concepts justice or productivity are formed.