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.
Difficult Freedom
Essays on Judaism — Levinas's 1963 collection that develops the explicitly Jewish-religious dimension of his philosophical-ethical project
Attribute Fingerprint
Rows where works disagree are highlighted in gold. The full ontology grid is shown.
| Attribute | Difficult Freedom (Mid (alongside Totality and Infinity)) |
|---|---|
| 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 | Infinite |
| Space · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Space · Curvature | Flat |
| Space · Dimensionality | Three |
| Space · Locality | Local |
| Matter · Extent | Infinite |
| 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 | Plural |
| Observer · Metaphysical Agency | Personal |
| Observer · Moral Authority | Scripture |
| 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
Difficult Freedom
The historical-Jewish time of the tradition; the post-Holocaust time of difficult freedom and difficult faithfulness.
Space
Difficult Freedom
The Jewish community, Israel, the European Jewish situation as the relevant spaces.
Matter
Difficult Freedom
Embodied Jewish religious-ethical life.
Observer
Difficult Freedom
The Jewish religious subject — embodied, plural, obedient to ethical demand. Personal-providential God as framework.
Energy
Difficult Freedom
The energies of difficult freedom — obedience to the ethical demand as the path to genuine freedom.
Information
Difficult Freedom
The Jewish tradition's preserved religious-ethical wisdom; the Holocaust as the historical event demanding theological reckoning.
Internal Tensions
Where each work's argument pulls against itself.
Levinas's insistence on a strict separation between his philosophical and Jewish writings has been continuously debated — are the two corpora really separable, or is the philosophical work essentially Jewish philosophy? The relation between Difficult Freedom's explicit theological content and the philosophical framework of Totality and Infinity is the central interpretive theme.