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.
The Roads to Freedom
Sartre's 1945-49 trilogy 'Les Chemins de la liberté' — Mathieu Delarue from the late 1930s to the 1940 fall of France
Attribute Fingerprint
Rows where works disagree are highlighted in gold. The full ontology grid is shown.
| Attribute | The Roads to Freedom (Middle) |
|---|---|
| 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 | Implicit |
| Space · Dimensionality | Three |
| Space · Locality | Implicit |
| Matter · Extent | Finite |
| Matter · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Matter · Conservation | Conserved |
| Matter · Dimensionality | Three |
| Matter · Locality | Implicit |
| Observer · Time Instance | Single |
| Observer · Space Instance | Single |
| Observer · Knowledge Extent | Immediate |
| Observer · Knowledge Retainment | Total |
| Observer · Physicality | Embodied |
| Observer · Agency | Active |
| Observer · Number | Plural |
| Observer · Metaphysical Agency | Impersonal |
| Observer · Moral Authority | Reason |
| Observer · Theological Method | — |
| Energy · Extent | Finite |
| Energy · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Energy · Conservation | Conserved |
| Energy · Dispersibility | Irreversible |
| Information · Ontological Status | Emergent |
| Information · Cosmic Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Personal Conservation | Non-conserved |
| Information · Granularity | Implicit |
Dimension-by-Dimension Evidence
What each work's passages reveal about its stance on each of the six dimensions.
Time
The Roads to Freedom
1945-49 publication; narrated time June 1938 to summer 1940 (i.e., the immediate pre-war and the German invasion of France).
Space
The Roads to Freedom
Paris (most of the trilogy), with extended sections in Berlin, London, the Czechoslovak borderlands (Vol. II), and various French and German locations (Vol. III).
Matter
The Roads to Freedom
Three-volume novelistic trilogy (~1200 pages total). The fourth volume's failure to be completed is itself part of the work's character.
Observer
The Roads to Freedom
Middle Sartre. The observer-novelist is the established philosophical author of Being and Nothingness (1943) extending his existentialist programme into the novelistic medium.
Energy
The Roads to Freedom
Existentialist-novelistic energies. The trilogy's distinctive force is its attempt to instantiate the abstract concepts of Being and Nothingness in concrete novelistic situations — Mathieu's bad faith about his pregnant lover Marcelle, his sister Ivich's bourgeois ennui, the homosexual student Daniel's hidden self-knowledge.
Information
The Roads to Freedom
Three published volumes (fourth never completed). The Dos-Passos-influenced simultaneity technique of Vol. II is the most technically experimental of Sartre's novelistic work.
Internal Tensions
Where each work's argument pulls against itself.
Sartre's most sustained novelistic exposition of existentialism; planned fourth volume never finished. Read alongside Being and Nothingness as the philosophical-fictional twin: the trilogy enacts narratively what the treatise argues abstractly. The trilogy's reputation has fluctuated — it was widely read in the 1950s-60s, less so since — but its central position in mid-century French existentialism is undisputed.