The Human Passion for Meaning Making: What Shapes Our Lives

Abstract

(Autumn 2013), 349–54. 5 Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Suspecting Glance (London: Faber, 1972), pp.9–12 & 63. 6 From General Richard Mulcahy’s speech at the inaugural meeting of the Council of Education, 5 May 1950 – published in Council of Education: Terms of Reference and General Regulations (Dublin, 1950). See also The Irish Times, 6 May 1950. 7 John A Murphy, ‘Easter 1916: Psychological Milestone Marked’, The Irish Times, 30 March 2016. 8 Felix M Larkin, ‘From Mythology to History: F.X. Martin and the Historiography of the 1916 Rising’, in Marnie Hay and Daire Keogh (eds), Rebellion and Revolution in Dublin: Voices from a Suburb, Rathfarnham, 1913-23 (Dublin: South Dublin County Council, 2016), pp.195–217. 9 Lyons wrote The Irish Parliamentary Party 1890–1910 (1951) and The Fall of Parnell (1964), as well as notable biographies of John Dillon MP (1968) and Parnell (1977). 10 Bryan Fanning, The Quest for Modern Ireland: the Battle of Ideas, 1957–1972 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008), p.221. 11 John J Horgan, Parnell to Pearse (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2009 [1949]), p.39. 12 Parnell’s words here are as recorded in William O’Brien, An Olive Branch in Ireland and its History (London, 1910), p. 47. They were quoted by Conor Cruise O’Brien in Parnell and his Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), p.145, n.1. 13 Donat O’Donnell [Conor Cruise O’Brien], Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Modern Catholic Writers (London: Burns & Oates, 1953), p. 103. 14 Patrick Maume, ‘Donogh O’Malley’, in James McGuire and James Quinn (eds), Dictionary of Irish Biography, vol.7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 15 From General Mulcahy’s speech to the Council of Education, 5 May 1950 (see n. 6 above). 16 Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland So Poor for So Long? (Dublin: Gill Books, 2004), p.178.. 17 Maume, loc. cit. 18 Anne Chambers, T K Whitaker: Portrait of a Patriot (London: Doubleday, 2014), pp. 176–8. 19 Maume, loc. cit. 20 Alvin Jackson, Judging Redmond and Carson: Comparative Irish Lives (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2018), pp.92 & 203 21 Jackson, Judging Redmond and Carson, p.150. 22 Jackson, Judging Redmond and Carson, p.128. 23 See Carson’s speech to the House of Lords in December 1921 on the Anglo-Irish Treaty, quoted in Geoffrey Lewis, Carson: the Man Who Divided Ireland (London: Continuum International Publishing, 2005), p.231. 24 Felix M Larkin, ‘Carson’s Abandoned Children: Southern Irish Protestants as Depicted in Irish Cartoons, 1920–60’, in Ian d’Alton and Ida Milne (eds), Protestant and Irish: the Minority’s Search for Place in Independent Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2019), pp.246–67, at 246–8. 25 From President Kennedy’s speech at Amherst College, 26 October 1963. Studies • volume 109 • number 435 292 Felix M Larkin The Human Passion for Meaning Making: What Shapes Our Lives William Mathews SJ In the preface and opening chapters of Ciarán Benson’s book, The Cultural Psychology of the Self, a major category treated is that of ‘the meaning making self’.1 This is a term that arose out of Jerome Brunner’s engagement with the notion of interactive learning in education. Wikipedia defines it as ‘the process of how people construe, understand, or make sense of life events, relationships and the self’. It is a process involved in counselling, educational psychology, and social semiotics. The present study will suggest that the human meaning making passion is a major force in shaping who we are in the central process of becoming that we all go through in our lives. Central to the discussion here will be the idea of the ‘no two the same’ concreteness of this process, its unique location, its linguistic dimension and the human values it involves. The discussion will briefly examine the meaning making passion expressed in Seamus Heaney and some other creative artists; then, at greater length, the physicist Albert Einstein; and, finally, the remarkable Etty Hillesum, who died in Auschwitz at the end of 1943.2 The elusive meaning makers In a BBC interview, Seamus Heaney described his understanding of his adult consciousness as like...