I was very sorry to learn that Heinrich Schepers has died. He was one of the most influential and supportive people in my graduate studies and early career. He had been for many decades the director of the Leibniz-Forschungsstelle in Münster, and probably knew Leibniz's manuscripts better than anyone else in the world.
He welcomed me at the research center when I came with a DAAD fellowship to stay for a year, in 1997-98. He took me to lunch once, and I learned a few things I can still remember. He was born in 1925 in Germany, but spent much of his childhood in Argentina. His family returned to Germany at some point, though I am not sure when. He was conscripted into Hitler's army, but spent most of his time as a soldier in an Allied prisoner of war camp. When the war ended, the medieval city center of Münster had been reduced to rubble, and Schepers was among the people who helped to reconstruct it, stone by stone. His career was motivated in large part by a principled commitment to securing Franco-German friendship in the post-war period, for which he rightly saw Leibniz as a model and so to speak a patron saint. He bemoaned the enduring popularity of Heidegger in German philosophy, both in view of the political resonances of Heideggerianism, but also because of what he took to be Heidegger's misunderstanding of the principle of sufficient reason, now Germanized as der Satz vom Grund: the one thing Heidegger seems to have wanted to take up from Leibniz and use for his own purposes.
Schepers is the only Leibniz scholar I have met in all these years who seems to have been, philosophically speaking, an actual Leibnizian.
I saw him ten or so more times in the past twenty years: every five years at the International Leibniz Congress, as well as on occasional visits to Münster. In 2016 I pushed him in his wheelchair around the basement of the Hannover Rathaus, searching in vain for an elevator.
Schepers was held to be a sort of Socratic figure, in that his reputation as a towering intellect was secured not by publication of his own theoretical work, but by action and interaction. In his case, “action” meant doing his part in the production of the Academy Edition of Leibniz's collected writings. This task has been ongoing since 1923, and is still not close to being finished. Schepers dragged out for several years longer than had been expected the publication of Series 6, volume 4, of the Academy Edition, Leibniz's philosophical writings through 1690. He was famously exacting in his editorial standards, and preoccupied with achieving maximum fidelity in editing to what Leibniz had put down on paper by his own hand, and to developing a critical apparatus that in turn gets us even closer to what was in Leibniz's mind at the moment of writing. Schepers thus provides, for me, a model of the ideal combination of wisdom and modesty, demonstrating how one can spend a valuable and influential career as a scholar devoted narrowly to what from the outside might look like the least of things: getting what someone else said a long time ago exactly right.
In 2014, when he was almost 90, Schepers published his first book, which was a collection of occasional pieces, and sometimes fairly informal notes composed over the course of the many years of his work on the edition. I wrote a short review of it for the German Quarterly. I realise now that I never saw it in its print version, but I'll post the text of it here.
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Heinrich Schepers, Leibniz. Wege zu seiner reifen Metaphysik, Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 2014.
Justin E. H. Smith
In the Preface to this volume Heinrich Schepers avers: "Direct reference to the manuscripts and their treatment in the Academy Edition caused engagement with the secondary literature to retreat into the background, for which I hereby ask for understanding." This is an omission that a younger scholar could not of course make, but when Schepers's request is not hard to grant. In remaining directly and constantly attuned to the primary sources, this volume approaches something like a direct communion with Leibniz's thought, a dialogue with him across the centuries.
The volume collects a number of Schepers's papers, reaching back more than half a century (the first dates from 1962). Together they provide a compelling record of the author's longstanding concerns, most important among these the precise meaning of Leibniz's rationalism-- in what sense he may be called a rationalist, and how his rationalism informs all of his other philosophical commitments.
A number of the chapters also testify to Schepers's crucial contribution over many decades to the edition of Leibniz's writings, and moreover to the theoretical reflection on the method and meaning of scholarly edition. As the long-time director of the Leibniz-Forschungsstelle in Münster, Schepers was witness to, and an active promoter of, the introduction of digital tools into textual edition. At the same time, as one of the world's foremost living experts on Leibniz's manuscripts, Schepers is aware of the ways in which any edition invariably transforms, and thus distorts, the handwritten text at its source. Edition thus requires a sensitivity and a psychological attunement to the mind of the author, in order to preserve and to convey as much as possible of the intentions that went into the creation of the original text.
This attunement is clearly on display in chapter 7 of the present volume, "Gedanken zu den Philosophischen Schriften (AA VI, 4)." The abbreviation in parentheses refers, as all Leibniz scholars will know, to volume 4 of series 6 of the Academy Edition of Leibniz, to the completion of which Schepers and the small group of editors in Münster devoted many years, often releasing preliminary drafts under the name of Vorauseditionen, so that the research community might have access to these texts, even as the definitive version of their edition remained a mere future projection. This work was finally completed in 1999, and it would be no exaggeration to say that its release, and the new accessibility of some of Leibniz's most important philosophical reflections, has brought about a revolution in Leibniz scholarship.
Schepers offers a classical, which is to say, among other things, a non-revisionist, interpretation of Leibniz's philosophy. For him, Leibniz is a conceptualist, a phenomenalist, an optimist, an irenist, and, first and foremost, a metaphysician. For Schepers's Leibniz, to say that he is first and foremost a metaphysician is to say that, for one thing, his engagement with the empirical sciences, such as microscopy, cannot be determinative for the content of his philosophical views. It is also to say that metaphysics comes before, well before, epistemology. He does not spend much time worrying about how we know the rational order of the world; he is too busy telling us what this rational order is, and what the basic principles underlying it are.
Leibniz is also a rationalist, or, to use Schepers's preferred qualifier, a 'strong' rationalist. But if he is not first and foremost an epistemologist, it cannot be that Schepers conceives Leibniz's strong rationalism in terms of the sources of knowledge, in terms of the debate between those who hold that knowledge is built on innate ideas, on the one hand, and on the other those who hold that all knowledge derives from experience. Rather, for Schepers, Leibniz is a rationalist to the extent that he, "trusting the power of reason, sets down principles, establishes definitions, and does not accept the validity of anything that does not follow from these" (219).
To believe in the power of reason, moreover, is to presume that the human mind has access to the rational order of nature, that is, that human reason is well adapted to, or in harmony with, the divine reason that underlies creation. Thus the power of reason enables us to set down principles that concern, most importantly, the nature of substance, and the way in which substances give rise to natural phenomena. The most foundational principle of Leibniz's rationalism for Schepers is the Principle of Sufficient Reason (which, particularly since Heidegger, has a different ring to it in the German rendering, der Satz vom Grund). And Schepers insists: "The Principle of Reason (Satz vom Grund) is not a principle of the theory of knowledge. It is not asked, whether and how the grounds can be known, but rather it is claimed, that there are such grounds" (223).
Schepers's insistence on 'strong' rationalism contrasts with the 'soft' rationalism defended by Marcelo Dascal and a few others, not least at a memorable conference that took place in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in 2005, entitled "Leibniz: What Kind of Rationalist?" The 'soft rationalist' reading would transform Leibniz into a somewhat more supple, somewhat more quasi-pragmatist thinker. But Schepers is not having it. Everything must follow from basic principles, with logical necessity and in metaphysical rigor. To backtrack at all from this commitment is to allow everything that is distinctive about Leibniz's philosophy to slip away. Schepers defends the 'hard line', he has been unflinching and constant in his long career of interpreting Leibniz. This approach might appear to have something to do with the vice of inflexibility, were it not for the fact that he is, by the evidence of the texts he knows so well, correct.
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