Work Classification Layer
Compare Works
Pick two or more works to set their attribute fingerprints, dimension-by-dimension passages, and shared school embodiments side by side. Especially useful for author-stage comparisons (Wittgenstein early vs late) and for setting a single tradition's foundational texts against each other.
Deliverance from Error
A short philosophical autobiography — doubt undermines kalam, philosophy, and Ismailism in turn, until Sufi experience grants the certainty doctrinal reasoning could not
Attribute Fingerprint
Rows where works disagree are highlighted in gold. The full ontology grid is shown.
| Attribute | Deliverance from Error (Late) |
|---|---|
| Time · Extent | Infinite |
| Time · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Time · Grain | Continuous |
| Time · Freedom | Non-Deterministic |
| Time · Traversability | Linear |
| Time · Dimensionality | One |
| Time · Direction | Uni-directional |
| Space · Extent | Finite |
| Space · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Space · Curvature | Flat |
| Space · Dimensionality | Three |
| Space · Locality | Local |
| Matter · Extent | Finite |
| Matter · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Matter · Conservation | Conserved |
| Matter · Dimensionality | Three |
| Matter · Locality | Local |
| Observer · Time Instance | Single |
| Observer · Space Instance | Single |
| Observer · Knowledge Extent | Partial |
| Observer · Knowledge Retainment | Total |
| Observer · Physicality | Embodied |
| Observer · Agency | Both |
| Observer · Number | Singular |
| Observer · Metaphysical Agency | Personal |
| Observer · Moral Authority | Experience |
| Observer · Theological Method | — |
| Energy · Extent | Infinite |
| Energy · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Energy · Conservation | Conserved |
| Energy · Dispersibility | Irreversible |
| Information · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Information · Cosmic Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Personal Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Granularity | Continuous |
Dimension-by-Dimension Evidence
What each work's passages reveal about its stance on each of the six dimensions.
Time
Deliverance from Error
The temporal structure of religious knowing — crisis, withdrawal, return — is the work's frame.
Space
Deliverance from Error
The autobiographical space of Baghdad, the journey to Damascus, Jerusalem, Mecca; the inward space of the soul in retreat.
Matter
Deliverance from Error
Embodied experience including the 1095 psychosomatic illness — the body as registering spiritual crisis.
Observer
Deliverance from Error
The first-personal observer at the centre — al-Ghazali's "I" testing doctrines against his own lived experience. Singular, embodied, both active in inquiry and passive in receiving divine illumination.
Energy
Deliverance from Error
The spiritual energies of doubt, faith, illumination — each described phenomenologically.
Information
Deliverance from Error
Religious knowledge as personally appropriated, not externally received; the central epistemic thesis.
Internal Tensions
Where each work's argument pulls against itself.
Scholars disagree about whether the autobiography is philosophically reliable or more a literary-pedagogical construction. The relation between the work's critique of falsafa and al-Ghazali's philosophical absorption in the Iḥyāʾ is debated. The Deliverance has sometimes been compared to Descartes's methodological doubt — but where Descartes ends in the certainty of the cogito, al-Ghazali ends in the certainty of Sufi experience. Whether al-Ghazali himself thought rational reasoning was finally adequate to its own task remains a contested interpretive question.