A philosopher of the Industrial Society
There are several reasons to argue that in his philosophy Kapp represented the breakthrough of the industrial revolution in Germany. In his geographical works (1845 and 1868) he had been keen on industrial and technical developments through which (western) mankind appropiated the world. In his vision mankind was the centre of history and culture, who used technics to submit the world in the process to self-awareness. In this respect his by Hegel inspired geography was a philosophical expression and confirmation of the importance of the industrial revolution.
In his romantic Grundlinien this confirmation even became more fundamental. When Kapp argued that everything mankind produces, as a result of projection of its organs, is to be interpreted as technics, then the only road to self-awareness leads through technics. Moreover, the only thing mankind can learn about itself is that in essence mankind is a technical species. Every manmade item is technical and if the only way to learn about oneself is through technics, what else could be the conclusion than that man is a homo technicus?
Homo technicus?
One can only wonder what mankind would have learned if Kapp in his Grundlinien would have subjected e.g. safetymatches (Böttger 1848), the reaper (McCormick 1851) or margarine (Mège-Mouriès 1868) to his analysis.
Nowadays in philosophy a priori reasoning is suspect and - with hindsight - in the philosophy of technics of Ernst Kapp this almost inevitably led to an overoptimistic embracement of technics. Still one should appreciate Ernst Kapp because he was the first to fully understand the importance of technics. As one of the first he recognized that in the middle of the 19th century the social, the natural and the artificial became interwoven.
More:
Ernst Kapp - Introduction / Biographical and bibliographical notes on Ernst Kapp / An analysis of the Grundlinien / A romantic philosophy of technology / Some literature on Ernst Kapp / About the author