Haverford College - Record Yearbook (Haverford, PA)

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Finally, a word must be said about Mr. Satter- thwaite ' s intellectual position, about the commit- ments which drew him into literary scholarship as a profession. As has been suggested above, he sees literature almost entirely in terms of the light it casts on immediate human experience ; the work he really enjoys, as distinguished from his formal academic obligations, is the analysis of works with strong psychological and moral significance, as, for instance, Donne ' s poems, or THE BROTH- ERS KARAMAZOV. As a Harvard Comparative Literature Ph.D., Mr. Satterthwaite is greatly concerned with par- allels in theme and event between works of various ages and cultures. However, his search for echoes is not merely that of a connoisseur, but rather reflects a concern for historicity, for both con- tinuity and change in the literary treatment of certain central experiences in Western culture. In dealing with particular works, he is more con- cerned with the psychology of plot situations than with overall symbolic and structural pat- terns. Unlike certain critics with less rigorous analytical minds, however, he sees this as a weak- ness in his own approach, and, far from resenting attempts to systematize ' a work, he is very receptive to structural interpretations. In his con- cept of criticism as a discipline, he is intensely concerned with style: he tends to value precision of formulation even above originality of thought. In line with his concern with literature as directly relevant to life, he is unsympathetic to works which are more concerned with recreating the texture of experience than with commenting on it: hence, at times, his seemingly irrational hostility toward Twentieth Century literature. Alfred Satterthwaite finds Haverford ' s size and atmosphere particularly congenial to his approach to teaching. And, conversely, the maintenance of Haverford ' s superiority as a small liberal-arts col- l ege demands the special capabilities of such a professor as Mr. Satterthwaite, however unpopu- lar his approach may be with many of the students who encounter him. Richard Wertime Alan Williamson 19

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One of the few exceptions to the unmerciful and irrevocable judgments which students pass upon ' the faculty ' , is Gerhart Spiegler, whom few students think they know well enough to praise or damn. Unlike those faculty whom we know well, and those for whom we have no hope what- ever. Mr. Spiegler meets us in class and out with an unmistakable honesty and yet remains a mys- tery. This disturbing man brings to Haverford an intriguing history which has clearly left its marks. After a fundamentalist upbringing and an un- doubtedly dashing undergraduate career in Ger- many, he came to the University of Chicago to study history and philosophy of religions ; then, for some reason, he was induced to become Haverford ' s religion department. Here, where student and faculty walk shoulder to shoulder, alike distin- guished and often indistinguishable, was an un- avoidable challenge to the traditional European ways, and this challenge has been met with a willingness and success notable even in this little paradise. In his involvement with us, Mr. Spiegler has brought us to a closer involvement with the ques- tions and decisions of man as an intellectual. In his classes, we must always decide whether to be quarrelsome (That ' s absurd!) or accepting (That is Absurd), much as he seems to be deciding whether to try to convince, or to ask acceptance. He clothes himself in the thoughts and feelings of the thinkers he teaches, becoming a real disciple of each in turn, yet always prepared to criticize later from his own unique position. There is in this method a gentle seduction: he would like to make us too disciples of each philosophy, giving us the EXPERIENCE of an ideology, not just its mere arms ' -length knowledge, so that our defense of it against his critique might be the believer ' s defense, not the skeptic ' s detached quibbling; for much of what he teaches has its meaning only when be- lieved. Gerhart Spiegler appeals always to the whole student, not conventionally to the intellect when in the classroom, to the residual man when in the ' informal places ' : it is not enough merely to think in the classroom, or merely to be amiable elsewhere. It is understood that the effort to understand, to participate in meanings, is inseparable from the serious student ' s life as a whole : only in so far as we understand what we are and how we have come upon the pr esent are we truly men. His aim, then, is surely not to teach us THINGS, but rather to teach us ways of meeting others, our history, ourselves. In his classroom, the intellect must itself stand up against, and not merely criticize, life: we ask whether the idea does justice to experience, and often whether our experience does justice to our possibilities as men. Each individual participates in each class from his unique vantage point, for the individual in his unique awareness is the only beginning, and the only end. we can grasp. And in looking back upon a class, one can see that Mr. Spiegler has 21