"But the narrator is inclined to think that by attributing overimportance to praiseworthy actions one may, by implication, be paying indirect but potent homage to the worse side of human nature. For this attitude implies that such actions shine out as rare exceptions, while callousness and apathy are the general rule. The narrator does not share that view. The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions, may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. on the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness" --Albert Camus, The Plague.
This spring I took one of the most rigorous classes of my academic career so far: Twentieth-Century European Intellectual and Cultural History. A lot of the thinkers and philosophers we read frustrated me with their ideas. However, one of the only thinkers whose work I found immediately appealing was the Algerian author and philosopher Albert Camus. He seems to have both a lucid and uncompromising understanding of the world unlike few people I have ever read. I don't agree with everything he says, but I always like the questions he forces me to consider.
