This essay shows the divergences and similarities between Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor and some aesthetical and philosophical conceptions. Although Lakoff and Jonson’s theory of metaphor arises in a theoretical context that refuses the categorization models based on the Aristotelic concept of meaning, it conserves some traditional features - such as the geometric ideas of mapping and of translation - that generate problems and difficulties in the definition of the authors’ experientialist proposal and in the agreement of cognitivist and phenomenological views. This article aims at showing how the reference to Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, in which the ideas of spatial relationships and spatial movements are reconsidered in light of the paradigm of the phenomenology of place, highlights those problems and suggests their rethinking.