Absolute metaphor

The term absolute metaphor describes the special case of a metaphor that has become independent of the facts it illustrates. It was coined by the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg in the context of his collaboration on the project of history of concepts (German: Begriffsgeschichte).

Blumenberg adopted from Immanuel Kant the phrase describing the relation between the physical world and the Unknown (similar to the one between an artifact and its designer), modifying it as the "transfer of reflection on an object of intuition to a completely different concept, to which perhaps no intuition can ever directly correspond." For example, "world is a theater" (theatrum mundi) is an absolute metaphor as it compares an impossible-to-define concept ("world") to an apparently unrelated one ("theater").