In The Sea, The Sea, James tells his cousin Charles Arrowby: “We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge”.¹ The irony is that Charles, an unreliable narrator writing his own memoir, is perhaps the novel's greatest example of this; he is a man so convinced of his self-knowledge that he cannot see his own self-deception. James, a Buddhist monk, has spent his life approaching the self through practice rather than argument. Murdoch, who kept her philosophy and her fiction deliberately separate, is doing something here that philosophy alone could not. Through the texture of a life lived on the page, she shows us that the cavern cannot be entered head on.

Iris Murdoch, who spent her life as both novelist and philosopher, was characteristically precise on this subject. In a 1977 conversation with Bryan Magee, she insisted that philosophy and literature have fundamentally different purposes, and should remain distinct. Philosophy aims to clarify, to dispel illusion, and to make arguments, whereas literature works through what she called mystification. This creates illusion, moves us emotionally, and engages the reader’s whole personality and experiences. The moment philosophy enters a novel, Murdoch posits, it ceases to be philosophy and becomes something else.

Murdoch’s fiction may not, by her own definition, be doing philosophy, but it does hint towards something philosophical about the limits of reason and the opacity of self. This illuminates how I view the question: that the novelist excavates and explores the cavern, while the philosopher maps the terrain and entrance. Granted, these activities are not the same, but nor are they mutually exclusive. Ideally, you would do both: read the novel and the philosophy, and let each accomplish what the other cannot.

Stijn Conix and colleagues recently tested this suspicion empirically, rating hundreds of philosophy journal abstracts for public relevance and tracking their reach beyond academia. Academic journals rarely publish work that non-specialists could engage with or would care about. Even when publicly relevant philosophical work does get published, it is frequently locked behind paywalls, accessible mainly to those with institutional logins. There are philosophers working against this - public philosophy initiatives, open-access journals, efforts to bring philosophical thinking into policy and public debate - but these remain the minority, working against an incentive structure that rewards insularity. Philosophy has not been displaced by the novel so much as it has retreated from public view. The novel has stayed where it always was. The question keeps getting asked because one side of a conversation has gone quiet, not because the other side has changed what it's doing, or is stepping up to take over the other’s work.

This is not a contemporary problem. Tolstoy appended a philosophy of history to War and Peace because the academic philosophy of his time lacked an adequate public framework for what he was trying to say. Dostoevsky staged the problem of freedom and faith at a depth that formal philosophy in 1880s Russia rarely reached for the general reader. Camus wrote novels and philosophical essays, and was sometimes unclear himself about which was which. 

Martha Nussbaum explores what the novel's side of the conversation offers. Her argument in Love's Knowledge² is not merely that novels contain philosophical insight, but that certain moral insights can only be expressed in narrative form. The kinds of moral situations she has in mind resist philosophical tidiness: tragic choices where no option is without cost, the slow creep of complicity, the particular texture of shame. These are not problems that yield readily to argument. Nussbaum contends that moral life is particular and that the novel is uniquely equipped to render that particularity with emotional and imaginative force. 

Proust wrote that emotions are “geological upheavals of thought".³ Not just interruptions to thinking, but a more subterranean, violent form of it. Nussbaum, drawing on Proust, goes further: understanding any single emotion is incomplete unless its narrative history is grasped. For her, since emotions have a temporal structure — they accumulate, recede, and return in a different form — only the narrative form can articulate that structure faithfully. 

This is what philosophy, by Murdoch's account, is not trying to do. Philosophy works above the surface of emotions to elucidate an argument, while the novel aims to entertain, to 'mystify', and to elicit an emotional response from the reader. This is why the two need each other: the novel reaches what philosophy cannot. On the flipside, philosophy does what the novel won't: it demands you reflect on what you find there, and refuses to let the experience’s beauty do the work of argument.

We live in an era of prescribed reading through Goodreads challenges and BookTok lists, with a mounting social pressure to publicise that you’ve read a certain number of the right books in a set amount of time. This makes reading seem transactional: you pick up the book, extract what it offers, log it, and move on to the next. These are not the conditions under which philosophical ideas actually take hold. Perhaps by picking up a text ready to be instructed, knowing it's an erudite philosophy piece, you might arrive with preconceived notions that can paradoxically make you less open to genuine change, or less receptive to new ideas. 

The novel works differently and in a far slower, subtler way. You pick up Never Let Me Go for the story, for Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth. Somewhere while reading, the questions about personhood and what we owe each other arrive not as arguments to be processed, but as a feeling of grief – a grief that takes hold before you've quite understood what you're mourning.

Emerson wrote that “in the works of great writers, we find our own neglected thoughts".⁴ This suggests that what the novel offers is not a set of structured ideas transmitted from writer to reader, but a set of conditions in which the reader's own thinking is encouraged and indeed necessary. Maren Tova Linett calls this the Literary-Philosophical Laboratory: fiction presents vividly imagined worlds in which certain values hold sway, and the more plausible we find those worlds (or the more we can relate to them), the more thoroughly we evaluate the justice of those values.

Whether a novel functions philosophically depends partly on the reader. The answer lies in the encounter between the text and a particular reader, who brings their own questions, emotions, and perspectives.

The novelist gets into the cavern, the philosopher maps the entrance. A person trying to understand themselves and the world around them would surely want both. The problem is not that novelists have taken over the philosopher's job, but that philosophy has become institutionally sealed off by incentives, jargon, and paywalls, preventing most people from accessing one side of that conversation. They are left with the novel alone, which is doing its own distinct thing, as it always has. The question understandably mistakes that absence for a replacement.