Good for nothing

Alasdair MacIntyre

  • Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit by Elizabeth Dipple
    Methuen, 356 pp, £12.50, January 1982, ISBN 0 04 163129 3

‘Philosophy, religion, science,’ wrote D.H. Lawrence, ‘they are all of them busy nailing things down ... But the novel, no ... If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, it either kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail!’ Hence Lawrence’s conclusion that only the novel can now do for us what philosophy once aspired to do:

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