Doctoral defence: Matthew Louis Kalkman "Enlightened Sovereignty: A Postsecular Semiotic "Image of God""

On December 15 at 16:15 Matthew Louis Kalkman will defend his doctoral thesis "Enlightened Sovereignty: A Postsecular Semiotic "Image of God"" for obtaining degree of Doctor of Philosophy (in Religious Studies).

Supervisors:

Associate Professor Thomas-Andreas Põder, University of Tartu

Associate Professor Valerio Fabbrizi, University of Rome Tor Vergata (Italy)

Opponent:

Professor Andrzej Wiercinski, University of Warsaw (Poland)

Summary

The Age of Enlightenment emerged from a fundamental contradiction in the work of one of its central figures, John Locke. On the one hand, Locke argued that legitimate social knowledge must be limited to what is visible, sensible, and grounded in everyday experience—the core of the empiricist tradition. Yet he simultaneously built a political philosophy on a premise that is inherently invisible: that all human beings possess inherent sovereignty and rights because they are created in the “Image of God.”

This tension between the visible and the invisible runs throughout Locke’s thought and continues to resonate in our postsecular age. The purpose of this monograph is to help ease that tension. It addresses a gap in the literature by exploring which aspects of the “Image of God”—interpreted symbolically—might still provide a foundation for sovereignty and human rights, even in contexts where church and state are formally separate.

Because this research question centers on symbolism, it requires a methodological framework drawn from the study of signs and symbols: semiotics. More specifically, it employs an embodied semiotics that incorporates teleodynamics and ideal eternal history. The monograph ultimately argues that there exists a dynamic, hierarchical process of semiosis and knowledge formation that can illuminate how sovereignty and human rights may be grounded in today’s postsecular world.

Key terms used to describe this underlying process of theosemiosis include: the eye of justice, altricial gaze, transformative authenticity, recursive “Self,” emergent exemplarity, zeroness, the golden eternity clause, and anaduction.