Abstract

For most thinkers the 20th century represented a time of sudden breaks and unprecedented violence, through its sequence of wars, totalitarianisms and genocides. Those events deeply changed the way evil is understood, mainly due to reflections that could explain how the significance of the crimes committed could not correspond to the individual intentions that caused them. This paper deepens the contribution given by Günther Anders to the topic of evil through the technocratic paradigm. Exploring the roots of atrocious actions and establishing meaningful connections among them through technology, his thought got to the discrepancy between productive omnipotence and impotence of emotions in figuring out both goals and effects of the products. His philosophy of discrepancy not only is a diagnosis of the roots of evil, but it is also a starting point to re-think the active role of emotions in the contemporary dimension of politics.