Angriest Rice Cooker Director’s Cut 8–On the measure of all things.
Protagoras is one of the most important presocratic thinkers. But like most presocratics, his writings exist only in those fragments that were quoted by Plato and other later philosophers whose works did survive. This is a fragment quoted by Plato. Although we don’t have the rest of the work that this line is the beginning of, the general understanding of it is that it is a statement of moral relativism. That is, Protagoras is saying that there are no external absolutes, only the perceptions of man. But when all you know about a person’s thoughts are what later thinkers who disagree with them said, it’s pretty hard to have a complete picture of what exactly he really meant.
It’s funny to think about how much our intelectual history is shaped by which texts survive and which don’t. Not that the process is totally random, of course. Texts survive that more people are interested in. But I wonder if our relationship to the classical philosophers might have been different if more opposing voices from that age had been available.
One other side note about this comic is that when I made the LiveJournal for The Angriest Rice Cooker in the World, I based the “interests” on all of the things I had written comics about at that point. So one of them was Protagoras. I think this might be the least common interest that I picked. I think there were like 15 other people on LiveJournal with that interest the last time I checked. And probably at least some of those were refering to the work by Plato named after Protagoras rather than the man himself.
This comic also marks the first time that I used a blank “beat panel” as part of a comic. In later strips, I would mess with the concept of the beat panel a lot. At this point, though, I think I was just using it to put some comic timing into a joke that might not otherwise have it. Plus I didn’t really have three panels worth of stuff to say.
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