Notes from This Last Week in October

These last few posts, as well as the majority of the posts over the next month or two, are all notes for a paper that I am planning for my MA Thesis. The title is going to be "Something About the Meaning of the Word 'Believe'." The idea at this point is to distinguish and define at three different types of belief: (1) The ordinary language use of "belief", (2) The analytic philosophical use of "belief", and (3) Søren Kierkegaard's concept of belief from "Fear and Trembling". Obviously, (or hopefully obviously) these three uses are very different from one another, and so force the question: Why use the same word in all three cases?
Silentio distinguishes between “conceptualizing” and “comprehending.” Maybe these two words are not synonyms, but they are very similar, even etymologically. (And I suspect that that similarity is even stronger in both Danish and German.) But I think that it is revealing to note that part of understanding the concept “faith” is to realize that one cannot understand faith, that it is part of the definition of “faith” that it is outside of the realm of Logos. (Lacan, the Logos speaks, Logos as God as Logos.) This positing of faith places it in the same family of concepts as “God” and “infinity,” a family that could be described as mystical. So I'll use this as a place-holder for Kierkegaard/ Silentio's concept of faith: Mystical Faith. (The capital letters signify that this is a technical term, and so is not, strictly speaking, the same as mystical faith.)
One of my main points is that Mystical Faith is divorced from belief, or from the act of believing (psychologically speaking), or from [my] understanding of the word-concept “believe.” This is Wittgenstein's point, but it is Kierkegaard's also.
Mystical Faith is unjustified and unjustifiable. (It transcends justice, it negates ethics.) “If faith cannot make it into a holy deed to murder one's own son, then let the judgement fall on Abraham as on anyone else.” (Hannay, 60) But doesn't this concept of faith, contrary to how it appears on the surface, actually in synch with our common understanding of faith? Faith is a kind of belief without justification. The common understanding of belief – what I tenatively label as Ordinary Belief – is related to the following word-concepts: “doubt”, “evidence”, “reason”. And these are anathema to Mystical Faith.