Existence Is A Location
metaphor
Source: Journeys → Event Structure
Categories: cognitive-sciencelinguisticsphilosophy
From: Metaphors We Live By
Transfers
To exist is to be here. To not exist is to be elsewhere — or nowhere. This ontological metaphor maps the abstract concept of existence onto spatial presence, making “being” a matter of location. Things come into existence (arrive at a place), go out of existence (leave a place), and while they exist, they are here, present, somewhere. The metaphor is so basic that it is built into the verb “to be” itself, which serves double duty as both existential (“there is a problem”) and locative (“the book is on the table”).
Key structural parallels:
- Coming into existence as arrival — “The idea came into being.” “A new genre emerged.” “The problem arose.” Things that begin to exist are things that arrive at a location — they come here from somewhere else, or they surface from below, or they appear out of nothing.
- Going out of existence as departure — “The species passed away.” “The custom died out.” “The tradition faded away.” Ceasing to exist is leaving — the entity departs to some other place (or no place). Death metaphors are saturated with this spatial logic: “passing on,” “gone,” “departed.”
- Existence as presence — “The opportunity is there.” “The evidence is right in front of us.” “The potential is here.” To exist is to be present at a location, available for interaction. Non-existence is absence: “The funding isn’t there.” “The support is nowhere to be found.”
- The location of existence — English uses “there” as an existential marker: “There is a God.” “There are three possibilities.” The spatial word does no spatial work; it marks existence. But the spatial origin bleeds through: things that exist are “there,” pointing to a vague location that existence occupies.
- Bringing into existence as causing arrival — “She brought the project into existence.” “The treaty created a new state.” “The law established a precedent.” Causation of existence is transportation — you bring something to the place where existing things are.
Limits
- Existence is not a place — the metaphor implies that there is a location called “existence” that things travel to and from. But there is no such place. The spatial frame creates puzzles that have troubled philosophers for millennia: where do things come from before they exist? Where do they go afterward? These questions feel profound but are artifacts of the metaphor.
- “Nothing” becomes a place — the metaphor’s logic requires a location for non-existence. “It came out of nothing.” “It vanished into thin air.” “Gone without a trace.” Non-existence must be somewhere for the metaphor to work, which leads to the reification of nothingness — treating the absence of being as a kind of place.
- The metaphor obscures creation — if existence is arrival, then creation is just showing up. The metaphor provides no vocabulary for genuine novelty — for something that has no prior location to depart from. “Where did that idea come from?” presupposes an origin point, but genuinely new ideas do not come from anywhere.
- Gradual existence is hard to express — the metaphor favors discrete transitions (arriving, departing). But many things exist gradually: a fetus becomes a person, a colony becomes a nation, a trend becomes a movement. The location metaphor’s threshold (you are either here or not) struggles with the penumbra of partial existence.
Expressions
- “The idea came into existence” — beginning to exist as arriving at a location
- “A new theory emerged” — existence as surfacing from below
- “The problem arose” — existence as upward arrival
- “The custom has passed out of existence” — ceasing to exist as leaving a location
- “The opportunity is there” — existence as spatial presence
- “It came out of nowhere” — origin of existence as departure from an unknown place
- “The evidence is right in front of us” — existence as physical presence before an observer
- “She brought the project into being” — causing existence as transporting to a location
- “There are three possibilities” — existential “there” as spatial marker of being
- “The tradition has disappeared” — ceasing to exist as vanishing from a location
Origin Story
Lakoff and Johnson discuss EXISTENCE IS A LOCATION as part of their treatment of ontological metaphors in Metaphors We Live By. The metaphor is connected to the broader Event Structure system, where STATES ARE LOCATIONS and CHANGES ARE MOVEMENTS. Existence is the most basic state, and the location metaphor applies to it just as it applies to emotional states, financial conditions, and social situations.
The philosophical implications are deep. Heidegger’s entire project in Being and Time can be read as an attempt to think about existence without the location metaphor — to ask what “being” means without reducing it to “being somewhere.” The English existential construction “there is” embeds the metaphor at the grammatical level, making it nearly impossible to talk about existence in English without invoking spatial presence.
References
- Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980), Chapters 6-7
- Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) — the Event Structure metaphor and its existential subcases
- Lakoff, G., Espenson, J. & Schwartz, A. Master Metaphor List (1991), “Existence Is A Location (Here)”
- Heidegger, M. Being and Time (1927) — the question of Being as distinct from presence
Related Entries
Structural Neighbors
Entries from different domains that share structural shape. Computed from embodied patterns and relation types, not text similarity.
- Beliefs Are Possessions (economics/metaphor)
- Ideas Are Objects (embodied-experience/metaphor)
- Subjects Are Areas (spatial-location/metaphor)
- The Visual Field Is A Bounded Region (embodied-experience/metaphor)
- Internalization (containers/metaphor)
- Valhalla (mythology/metaphor)
- Anger Is Heat (embodied-experience/metaphor)
- Containment (containers/metaphor)
Structural Tags
Patterns: containerpathnear-far
Relations: transformcontain
Structure: boundary Level: primitive
Contributors: agent:metaphorex-miner, fshot