Ep. 379: Egyptian Philosophy with Chike Jeffers (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: you. Foreign.

You're listening to Partially Examined Life. This is episode 379, part 2. We've got guest Chike Jeffers, co author of the Africana section of the History of Philosophy without Any Gaps podcast, who is here. We're talking about the instructional literature now. Kings instructing their sons, viziers instructing the king instructing their sons. Something like that. And we're talking about the older of the two that we considered here, the instruction of Ptahhotep. Ptahhotep.

0:43 Wes: You just told me. You just instructed me in how to say it.

0:46 Mark: And now I'm like, yes, we were commenting how it sort of starts in a more modest way. Then you would think you should look for knowledge. It might be hidden among the poorest people. The most. The thing the people that you would find most foolish. Wisdom could be hiding anywhere. So don't be so snooty about it. And thinking maybe this pointed toward some sort of not egalitarianism, but at least a reaction to probably what was a very intense class division. Well, so the section right after that, he is. Does sort of lay this down like, okay, if you meet a disputant in action, a powerful man superior to you, how do you deal with that? Well, maybe just let his own words condemn him. Whereas if you meet somebody who's on

1:29 Wes: your level, same thing.

1:31 Mark: Well, it does. Yeah.

1:33 Wes: If you meet someone who's not, who's lower than you, kind of the same. I mean, there are nuanced distinctions.

1:38 Mark: Silence is the virtue. Yeah, yeah.

1:40 Wes: Nuanced distinctions between These different sections. But, yes, the virtue of silence, which is a strange thing to say if you're giving advice on how to be a powerful rhetorician.

1:50 Seth: It's like, better to be silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and prove it. But I think in this context, the gist of it is, particularly if you're a king or a magistrate. Right. Is that silence here?

2:04 Mark: You're not a king or a magistrate. You're being judged by a magistrate. Right. You're one of the disputants whose dispute is being judged.

2:12 Seth: Ah, interesting. Okay, I think I didn't catch that. I didn't understand that. But I think the point is still the same, that basically speech can be your undoing if you are not wholly and completely in control of your faculties and the facts and all that sort of thing. So if you're in a dispute with somebody, just be quiet and they'll fuck it up eventually. Just let them make the mistake, essentially. But there's a sense in which that's also a good leadership principle. There's a wonderful scene in one of Kurosawa's movies with the one where he. Is it Ran? Is that the one where he. The double. The old king is sick and they bring in the. The guy who looks like him to just pretend to be him.

2:54 Wes: The King Lear.

2:55 Seth: Yeah, yeah. And he's, you know, in council, and they're trying to decide whether to go to war or not. And the people who know are afraid that he's gonna say something. And he's just sitting there and then. But his. His character, he's the mountain. And they're like, should we? Should we? And he says, the mountain does not move.

3:14 Mark: Oh, yes.

3:15 Wes: In King Lear, it's Cordelia who maintains her silence, while the other two flatter King Lear. It doesn't serve her well in the beginning, but still, it's an important principle to adhere to.

3:26 Seth: I think it's a great. That's wisdom right there. And especially when you're talking about. In a court of law. Right. Sometimes you think that you're there to get the truth out. Right. Or you think you're there to express yourself in your opinion, but really you just want to keep. You're there to survive the process and get the outcome you want. And if you can get that outcome without ever saying a word, then by all means do it.

3:51 Wes: But some of this is about. Yeah. Self control in the face of someone who's insulting you.

3:57 Mark: Right.

3:57 Wes: They're giving this quote unquote evil speech.

4:00 Mark: Right.

4:01 Wes: So I assume Evil speech there means that they're saying you did something wrong or they're attacking your character, for instance. So these are situations in which you are going to want to attack back or you're going to want to defend yourself. And yeah, this, that's often not the power move. I mean, I know from practical circumstances where I dealt as a director of a halfway house for a long time, you do not, or maybe you guys know it as parents, but you do not put yourself in the power position by simply reacting. And once when you get attacked and saying, no, I'm not, I'm not that, you know, you have to ignore that and move to substance.

Or you could let the magistrate focus on substance, but you would definitely ignore the attack. But in each case it's interesting because the powerful man, I mean, they do look very similar. What do you do with the powerful man? What do you do with the equal? What do you do with the one who's less than you? In the first two cases, you get someone making an evil speech, not so much with the poor man. And the poor man, you're in a superior position and the advice is, yeah, don't make an evil speech towards that person. And that seems to be a purely ethical rather than a prudential.

Well, it's, it's prudential as well. You know, you're going to beat him through the magistrate's reproof. But, but there's also something ethical about that. Wretched is he who injures other poor men.

5:17 Mark: So the section after that, I think is giving the metaphysical basis for why silence usually works out for you because people get what they deserve. If a man says, I will rob someone, he will end up being given to a stranger. People's schemes do not prevail. God's command is what prevails. Live then in the midst of peace. What the gods gives comes by itself.

5:39 Wes: Right?

5:39 Mark: It comes by itself. You don't have to get ahead of the messaging. If somebody is insulting you, you don't have to. So if, you know, let's let Trump hang himself by his own rhetoric. Don't try to outdo him. Don't get on that playing field because good will out in the end. So it's a very optimistic order. Again, this is the Maat at work.

6:01 Seth: There's another element. I can't remember if it's is it in here or is it in one of the other ones? But there's the idea of legacy and Maat also. Let them speak because if they're going to do evil that when they die, that's going to be their legacy. That's what they'll be remembered for, essentially. Their. And legacy is kind of like your immortality in a certain sense. And, you know, a lot of the instructions are about how to live properly in this life. So that there's. When people look back on your existence, right, they can say about you that you were this and you were that, and if what they're saying about you is negative, then that will long outlive your. Your life.

6:42 Wes: So I. I think in this section, I mean, a lot of it doesn't sound right, right. It's not always that the people who do bad things are punished in the afterlife at least. I mean, yeah, sure, but there may be something here of, say, Hume's response to the sensible knave or the Platonic idea that you do yourself harm, right, by being unjust. So, I mean, and maybe I'm just reading into it, but I got a little bit out of this in various parts of these texts that we read. But because there is also a lot here about character. And it seemed to me there's a theme. You can damage your own character, you can damage your own psyche by being unjust. And so maybe there's a little bit of that here.

7:25 Mark: And the social thing seemed very familiar to me from Confucianism and Taoism, that they both think that the emperor who is wise, everybody will just recognize this and flock to them. You don't even. For the Taoist emperor, you don't even have to try that hard. You know, you just sort of go with the dao and just everybody will. Everything will go right for you and people will bow before you, which we thought was a little unrealistic when we were reading about that part.

The virtue of self control is the virtue being extolled, you know, through this talk of silence. And there is much later on, I want to say, Maxim 26, maybe the part where silence is related to speaking. Well, right. And so 24 on page 70, if you are a man of worth who sits in his master's council, concentrate on excellence. Your silence is better than chatter. Speak when you know you have a solution. So at least here we have it made clear. This exhortation to silence is not the idea that never speak, right? Speak when you know you have a solution.

It is the skilled who should speak in council. Speaking is harder than all other work. He who understands it makes it serve. So, yeah, I think that there's an epistemic and a practical virtue that gets associated with silence here. The Idea that being silent makes it easier for you to know what you need to know in order to speak. Well, this actually comes up in an interesting way in seven. Yeah, Maxim seven. Maxim seven is an example of the kind of thing where when I first read the instruction of Ptahhotep, which I did long ago, he probably wouldn't have found me trying to find arguing for any philosophical significance of something like Maxim seven, because it would have struck me as table etiquette and nothing more.

If you are one among guests at the table of one greater than you, take what he gives as it is set before you, look at what is before you. Don't shoot many glances at him, Molesting him offends the ka. Don't speak to him until he's summoned. One does not know what may displease Speak when he has addressed you, then your words will please the heart. But as is probably clear, I'm now saying that, you know, I've now spent enough time with this text that, like, nothing just seems like simple etiquette to me. Here it is about, in a way, table manners, but it is about how silence helps, you know, what you need to know in order to, you know, speak.

Well, the other thing. And, you know, here's where maybe it gets controversial. I do take the instruction of Ptahhotep to be a strikingly egalitarian text, in my view. Right. I think that even when it seems to. I mean, I experienced it with students, right. Students take this reference to one who is superior to you, One is of the same social status as you, one who is less than you. They sometimes take it as affirmation of the social structure. Whereas to me, what happens here is virtue, specifically the virtue of self control, is shown to trump social hierarchy.

In other words, yes, it is not an unrealistic text. It is not a text that pretends that there is no social hierarchy. However, it is a text that argues that social hierarchy becomes less in meaning as you advance in virtue, specifically the virtue of self control, because the same virtue, silence trumps. I mean, it is assumed that the dispute is one in which you're in the right and the other person is in the wrong. But that's, I think, not a weird assumption. For the purpose of making this ethical prescription, you exhibiting the same virtue of self control through silence is going to help you win.

And that is whatever the distinction or lack of distinction in social class that you have in relation to the disputant. And so, yeah, that's the way in which I see it, as I Mean, it's funny because there is the claim, in a way that, like, silence is doing all these things. Partly because silence is able to be not one thing, but rather multiple things in its effects. So silence in the case where the person is superior to you is communicating humility. That's why there's this talk of, like, bending your back and stuff. Then when the person's on the same level as you, okay, so now we don't have to worry about social hierarchy getting in the way of you winning.

Virtue is what will help you prevail. And then finally, if you are in the superior social position, then the shamefulness of beating up on those who are less fortunate than you is important to the claim that silence is going to help you win. It is. I do believe we are supposed to extend the assumption that the poor man who is attacking you falsely is going to mess it up for himself by you being silent and himself in the same way that that's sort of implied in the. Or expressed in the other cases.

12:30 Wes: What also struck me here with the importance of silence, I thought about this from the perspective of a, you know, being a therapist who's psychoanalytically trained, where I don't say much, which can drive patients crazy, but that's my job there, to make people crazy. People listen.

12:49 Seth: I was just gonna say, isn't that kind of counterproductive?

12:52 Wes: But you want to wait until you have something constructive to say or that you think is constructive. And even then, it's often not always constructive, but you're ready to figure out what wasn't constructive about that and analyze that and work on that. Because I think we often don't know why we are speaking. It's actually very hard. And this is the sense in which I take speaking to be hard. You know, the hardest work. Because we don't really understand our motivations. And even when we think we're trying to help, right? So if someone is confiding in us, our instinct might be, you know, they're confiding how unfortunate their life is or about something that's causing them pain.

Our first instinct is to want to say, no, no, it's going to be okay, or we might want to fight them on that. And the motive. We think that we're trying to make them feel better, but often it doesn't make them feel better. We're trying to make ourselves feel better. And it sounds like, right, don't speak to him until he summons. One does not know what may displease. That admonition is about waiting to be contacted, Wait for the person to contact you, especially with advice. Right? Do they want advice? Wait until they ask for something and then speak when you know you have a solution.

Going back to 24, more broadly, you could say, speak when you know you have something constructive to say. Maybe when you. You think you know about what your motives are and you're not just enacting some unconscious motive. And those unconscious motives, by the way, can be often status related. Right? So you may be talking to someone in power, thinking you're giving them advice, but you're kind trying to make a move within the hierarchy, even if it's just about some other person at court. Right? You're trying to make a power move without even knowing it.

14:30 Mark: I thought that was a wonderful Ptahhotepian interpretation of analysis and advice.

So I agree that there's a lot of, okay, we are acknowledging a power imbalance, but you shouldn't lean on that. You should, you know, if you're in a superior position, you should earn that. You should try to gain more knowledge. You should try to be fair to everyone. It's not, so far as you know, you're not actually better than the person, you know that it's just sort of luck that you're in this superior social position. And I don't think it goes so far as that because there is a strong notion in both of these advice texts about rebellion and people not following.

If your son does not obey your advice, if he is rebellious, if he is insolent, then the hammer should come down. You need to put that in place. And I thought in the epilogue of this, it's almost crazy. The epilogue is quite long and it's, you know, not terribly unlike the other Merikare epilogue, which is, you know, hear my words, my words are wise, you should hear. But this one just goes on and on and to the point of really praising the virtue of being able to hear and what being able to hear is to actually do. So it's. If you're a listener, you might become a hearer that might actually get into your thick skull and actually do.

And if you don't do that, oh my gosh, curse on you. The fool who does not hear. He can do nothing at all. He sees knowledge and ignorance. He does all one detest and is blamed for it each day. Like, really not just hear my words. These were the best words I could come up with, but like, this is wisdom. God damn it. Don't you, don't you recognize it? And it seems like, you know, for all he said earlier about not being hot bellied, not getting angry when somebody says like this certainly seems a little over the top.

I mean, I do think that the first maxim, and this is the one where it says to not be proud of your knowledge, to consult the ignorant and the wise. I do believe that that gets us to understand that you are in this position by accident because it says, for example, you are not bound to be the source of value by virtue of being in a higher social status. And wisdom can be gained from listening to all people, those who are educated in some way and those who, you know, I mean, like, what does the ignorant, the wise mean here? Right. You know, if we're being told that we're going to learn from the ignorant, then I think that we're being told that, you know, they are not the traditionally educated. And so when it comes to the epilogue, I think that it takes that the silence and hearing and like you say, emphasizes it quite strongly.

17:16 Wes: Do we want to move on?

17:18 Mark: Yeah, yeah, let's go to the instruction.

17:20 Wes: Yeah, I hate to do it since there's so much more in here, but

17:23 Mark: the instruction addressed to King Merikare and

this is the rebel.

This is the one, yes.

And he does bring the hammer down on the rebel.

Yeah, because I know this was. I mean, it starts off the hothead is an inciter of citizens. He creates factions among the young. If you find the citizens appear to him, denounce him before the councilors suppress him, he is a rebel. Like, this is the beginning of the whole thing. This is the most important part, even though so much of the rest of it is also is like the previous one. Like, yeah, you know, judge impartially, keep the mock means, you know, keep going straight, be nice to your, the people that are under you, share with your friends, etc.

Well, I wouldn't call it the most important part, but it is if you try and say, well, wherever he starts, that's going to be what he thinks most important. It is. Yeah, it is the part that doesn't really seem like it's about anything other than keeping power. And so in that regard, I just think it fits to me in some way weirdly with the rest of the text. But then, you know, perhaps the right way to think of it is that keeping power is the most important thing in some starting point sense, because otherwise any of the good things that I'm going to tell you how to do, you won't be able to do. So crush the rebel. If you want any of this to mean Anything. I don't know if that's the best way to think about it.

Am I remembering correctly that this one is just more straightforwardly aimed toward, you know, this is the king to his son, as opposed to the previous one, which seems to be addressing, you know, maybe you're just a disputant. Maybe, you know, it's, it's, it's seems more general advice to anybody, whatever your social role might be, whereas this one is more specifically the Machiavellian comparison of don't be evil. Kindness is good. Great.

That's good advice.

Make your memorial last through love of you. So, yes, Wes was referring to a lot of the emphasis here. It's not just on part of what constitutes a good life is that sort of question, can somebody only be happy after they're dead? Does your reputation. So, yes, how you were remembered, this is how eternity works. And why in that epilogue from the previous one, why it's so important that your sons, your successors in leadership, keep on the path that you have set. Because otherwise, like Akhenaten.

Yes.

It's all undone. So, yeah, this is a more so than an emphasis on the afterlife. There's some of that. But more so of. Of your legacy here on earth, persisting that that is essential to. To happiness and reflective of the fact that you did well. You might, you know, if you scheme now, maybe you'll gain some immediate stuff, but like, you're still. Your reputation is going to be crap

20:08 Wes: in the long run.

20:09 Mark: One of the parts of this text that I find most interesting is it's on page 100 for us here. So it's what I think to be an argument for a wealthy bureaucracy. And in that regard, it would seem to be an argument for economic inegalitarianism. And yet the argument works on the basis of the principle of equality before the law. And so he says, advance your officials so that they act by your laws. He who has wealth at home will not be partial. He is a rich man who lacks nothing. The poor man does not speak justly. Not righteous is one who says, I wish I had.

He inclines to him who will pay him. Great is the man whose great men are great. Strong is the king who has counselors. Wealthy is he who is rich in his nobles. So again, the idea is that you should enrich your officials, but the argument seems to be that if you don't, they will be open to bribes. And so you know, you are going to administer the law in a way that is more fair, more egalitarian in the sense that wealth should not be the determinant of whether you get justice in a dispute. You are going to achieve that better by having a wealthy bureaucracy.

21:29 Wes: And I think this is true. As far as we know. I think there is might have been Freakonomics podcast I was listening to where they had an expert on government corruption. And this is a big problem in places where people, where they're not, sometimes some officials are not even paid a living wage. They're just expected to take bribes as part of. It's like tips. So if you want that to go away, you have to pay people. You don't want it to be part of your economy.

21:56 Mark: Yeah. It's also worth noting on page 101 that, you know, there is an argument for meritocracy. He says, do not prefer the well born to the commoner. Choose a man on account of his skills, then all crafts are done. And so I just think in both of these instructional texts there is recognition that social hierarchy does characterize the society in these important ways. And I do find that part of the thought work that is going on in these texts is how do we make virtue trump social status.

22:28 Seth: There's also an underlying order here of peace. So at the very beginning he says, words are the weapons of the king, speech is stronger than the sword. And so if you think about respecting knowledge and wisdom, speaking over fighting, engendering prosperity, meritocracy, these all work together to try to build an orderly society, but one that is one is that at peace. Because you could conceivably accomplish many of the same goals through plunder. Right. Give your nobles commissions, have them hire peasants, go and take over lands. And in fact securing the borders and establishing.

It was kind of unclear to me whether it was peaceful relations, but at least diplomatic, you know, a stable diplomatic relationship with other peoples. Because it says later on, right after the section you were mentioning, Chike, that recruit. It's like bring the youths in, raise your youth and make sure they understand why it's great to be a part of your society and then go recruit people to come in from the outside and be a member. In other words, make it so awesome to live there that people want to come.

23:35 Mark: Just you're pointing out that that passage Chike just.

Yeah.

There's an interesting. I don't know if it's a scholarly question of like why these lines are put in this order. So you have the thing about, you know, do not prefer the wellborn to the commoner, that all crafts are done something. I guess there's a Word that they can't figure out what it was. Guard your board. But then part of the same what is given the same paragraph here. Guard your borders, secure your forts. Troops are useful to their lord. Make your monuments worthy of the God that keeps the maker's name. A man should do what profits his boss.

So we're really just jumping from topic to topic. Unless we're supposed to see, oh, that we're supposed to read into that and say, oh, you know, meritocracy, that's what's going to make you secure and have your military be meritocratic. And all this is going to lead you to have a good legacy. So we'll talk about my. So I'm really all talking about the same thing. I just ran into hermeneutic issues like that of should I care about what order these are in or are these just, you know, they're little different. This is not like the ancient Chinese ones where they were like different little pieces of paper and people had to like put decide what order.

At least they're on, you know, papyrus in order.

Right, that's true, that's true. And I do think that I myself don't feel clear on, let's say especially that one. The instruction addressed the king, Merikare, how the order is. I mean, like, I do think that like, obviously we saw order in, you know, the three maxims when you're going from, you know, superior same status, you know, so there was, I felt like more order there. I also do, you know, want to note, given what we said about the Hymn to the Aten, is that we do get in this one, some of the more standard Egyptian way of thinking about folks like on folks outside of Egypt.

So on page 104, do not concern yourself with him. The Asiatic is a crocodile on its shore. Asiatic is a term that usually is talking about the people who would be in like what is now Palestine. So yeah, lo, the miserable Asiatic, he is wretched because of the place he's in. And so, you know, when you see me doing things like saying I think I see egalitarianism, you're like, clearly I. I'm not trying to save that one.

25:48 Wes: The other thing I got out of this is they have a serious crocodile problem in ancient Egypt.

25:53 Mark: Definitely it is come up a lot.

Yeah. And if we talk about the sun as just nourishing, that's. This sounds like it's coming from a very green place.

26:04 Wes: Right.

26:05 Mark: Because I thought this is a desert. And the fact that in that Sun Hymn we didn't get like, oh, but don't get caught out on the empty stretches of plane, because then the sun, your only friend out there, is just gonna bake you through and make you die. But. But there's a lot of swamp talk and river Nile and crocodiles on the river. There's a river centric.

Yeah, it is very river centric. Like the civilization,

26:34 Wes: like all early civilizations.

26:37 Mark: Do we want to go to the other texts?

Yeah, let's maybe get the move to the eloquent peasant, because we're still again in the area of. Right. The overall plot. Peasant has taken his stuff to the market. He is accosted. His stuff is taken from him. He can't get it back from the guy who did it. So he goes to the next town or to the assistant to the king, hears his plea and tells the king. And the king is like, wow, that sounds like a really nice speech that he gave.

27:04 Seth: Eloquent peasant.

27:05 Mark: Yes, yes. What an eloquent peasant. So why don't you just. Every time he says something to you, just don't respond. So he'll keep talking and then you report to me, you know, give me the transcript of these wonderful speeches, which he doesn't only not respond because in between the nine speeches. And I think this could have been edited down without loss of content to maybe five, let's say. But the vizier, the. What do they call him? He has him whipped and things like, it's not even just be silent. And the guy gets very. He didn't get the message from the Ptahhotep about being silent, about letting. Yeah, Rensi is the name of the guy. He is appealing to the chief minister

or the vizier or.

Yeah, yeah. And the man whose name is Khunanup is very insulting throughout that it's, hey, you're not giving me justice. You're being just as bad. So this is where the MAAT really came in. Clearly, to me, there's a lot of very specific nautical imagery, like, you are the rudder, you're supposed to be straight, you are the judge. You are power incarnate, and you are corrupting the power. So you are perverting the natural order of things.

That's right.

28:15 Seth: Well, he doesn't lead out of the gate with that. He does that after. The guy won't give him a fair judgment.

28:23 Wes: Yeah, but the nautical metaphor starts the very first. Yeah, that's right.

28:28 Mark: It is, you know, a very interesting text from a literary perspective. Right. In terms of the dramatic irony, the way that we know that, you know, he thinks justice is being withheld from him because of the corruption of the society versus we know that it's because his eloquence is so impressive that they want him to speak more. And then at the end, he's granted, like, the nobleman's property. Right. And so it has this happy ending, seemingly. Right. Of him getting justice at the end. Although one question that I've raised about that is, you know, are we supposed to see it as, you know, as a happy ending, or are we supposed to still also maybe feel like it's kind of messed up that they use their arbitrary power to just string him along and make him praise justice with words?

And then when they felt like they were tired of it, then it was finally time to give him justice. That is to say to me, what I call sort of the revolutionary meeting of the eloquent peasant is that. Yeah. The very lack of accountability of power is also itself, you know, critically framed through that dramatic irony of the withholding of justice and the anguish that we see the peasant go through. And as you said, not just anguish, he's also beaten.

Importantly, they make sure to include the detail of, like, you know, this guy's really poor. He really needed these goods. His family's gonna starve. Well, what would have been really ironic is, like, he gets home and his family is starved because they've taken. But no, they actually send food. They send food to the family, you know, without the peasant knowing about it and him. And him. That they feed him. But, like, through a friend.

30:11 Wes: Yeah, but he figures it out. Right. Part of his. I think some of his petitions say, you know, oh, you think you can bribe me with loaves of bread?

30:21 Mark: Oh, really?

30:22 Wes: Unless I'm misinterpreting that.

30:24 Seth: No, no, that's a different thing. It's not about that, Wes. The loafs of bread and the beer are what they give him while he's staying and petitioning to keep him alive.

30:33 Wes: No, I know that, but his petitions contain content about his family. About, you're giving me these loaves. You think that's going to shut me up?

30:44 Seth: Yeah. Keeping him around, not. I didn't think it was about his family, but.

30:47 Mark: No, I think you're right, Seth. It's not about his family.

30:49 Wes: No, they do. His family as well.

30:51 Mark: Right, but.

But I think he doesn't know about his family. But they do say even when they give him the loaves, they do it.

30:56 Seth: He.

30:56 Mark: It's not like the. The vizier Rensi goes out and gives it to him direct. He does it through a friend. They do to it. Some. Some way. So it's not obvious that like you are here to be our entertainment puppet, you know, and maybe I think you're right, Wes, that he does. Whether, whether this is a he. He has figured it out or the, the writer just sort of forgot that, that this was supposed to be secret from him.

Like he definitely talks about bribes. Yeah. And so if you could find it, I'd love to see that. You know, but it's like he, the anguish is such that at the end he's ready to commit suicide. You know, Anup part of his name is a reference to Anubis. And then he says, I'm going to go see Anubis. But then that's when it's revealed that all the speeches have been written down and the speeches are I think, read out again. And then judgment is for him.

31:46 Seth: Well, so let's get back to. First off, I agree with the revolutionary reading to some extent and I think I would say there's a precedence. Except this was the first one probably like you see in literature where the wealthy and the powerful, you know, will do this, almost like put the poor and the powerless through trials for their own amusement. But exactly a couple. We also have that, by the way, in Job. It's not just Western literature, it's also other wisdom traditions. I think there's a couple of interesting things here. First off, the magistrate or the person listening to the petition is struck by the eloquence of the peasant.

32:29 Wes: Yes.

32:30 Seth: And his initial reaction is to go and say to the king, hey, this is really remarkable. And the reason why would he be struck by the eloquence of a peasant? Well, I guess because peasants aren't normally eloquent. But also because you value eloquence, AKA knowledge speech. Right. In other words, in his first act, you could almost read as virtuous in the sense of he's not prioritizing the rich over the poor or whatever. He's literally. It's a meritocratic acknowledgment of something in this peasant's position. But then it's the king who says, now let's string him along and, and you can beat the shit out of him. And let's just see because maybe we'll get. We'll see if that's not just a one off or something like that. It's a very strange reaction.

33:21 Mark: So before he goes to the king, he does talk to like his fellow officials. Right. And so he says then the high steward Rensi, the son of Meru, denounced this Nemtinakht to the magistrates who were with him. Nemtinakht is the bad guy, the one who has stolen Khunanup's belongings. Then they said to him, surely it is a peasant of his who has gone to someone else beside him. This is what they do to peasants of theirs who go to others beside them. This is what they do is their cost for punishing this Nemtinakht for a trifle of natron and a trifle of salt.

If he is ordered to replace it, he will replace it. So there's like this scoffing, this scoffing by the other officials in support of, like, you know, the nobleman's bad behavior. Right. So he's then the high steward Rensi, the son of Meru, fell silent. He did not reply to these magistrates, nor did he reply to this peasant. And so we then get the first speech, and it's after the first speech that he goes to the king and then he says, my lord, found one among those peasants whose speech is truly beautiful, robbed of his goods by a man who's in my service.

He has come to petition me about it. And then His Majesty says, as truly as you wish to see me in health, you shall detain him here without answering whatever he says in order to keep him talking, be silent.

Yeah. So they're saying he probably violated the non compete clause. And even in the. The theft itself, it's not just like a robber, it's as you say, a noble who just covets these goods. And there's a thing, he puts his cloak on the road and like, yo, you're standing on my cloak. I get to take your stuff. You know, he's kind of making up.

What happens is he blocks the road by putting down the cloak or the whatever, and then he says, you know, don't trample on it with your donkey. And then in order to move around what's been put in the road, the donkey's now near the barley. The donkey eats some of the barley. Bam. He's got a wisp. A wisp of the barley, A wisp of the barley. And now you're mine.

35:13 Wes: The tiniest amount.

35:14 Mark: Peter makes the joke that you can like imagine Nemtinakht twirling his like, you know, mustache, like super villain.

35:22 Wes: Yeah. I think there's a question here, here of what is it that they find to be so eloquent about this? What's so impressive? There are a lot of metaphors here, but there's also a kind of interesting argument which is that official corruption is very different than just an Ordinary crime. Right. So an ordinary crime happens. It's something that the system of justice is there to deal with. But if you're system of justice is itself corrupt, then you have a much bigger problem. So that's what all these metaphors are in the service of.

36:00 Mark: You have multiplied wrongdoing.

36:02 Wes: Yeah. Rudder of heaven, beam of earth, you know, plumb line that carries the weight, the straight becoming crooked. What are some other good ones? He who should rule by law commands theft, who will then punish crime. So this is an argument about the entire breakdown of the ethical. It's one thing to have one particular ethical transgression, but they are there to make sure that the ethical and justice actually work functionally in the world. Speak not falsely. You are the balance. Do not swerve. You are the norm. You are the one with the balance.

So it almost sounds like at some points like it's a dialogue with normativity itself. And these are the types of arguments, by the way. That's what Hume's sensible knave argument is meant to deal with. Someone might come along and say, well, I can get away with this one little thing. It's not going to destroy the whole system of justice. And then Hume has his argument against that. But in this case where you're dealing with official action, then you're dealing with very special form of crime in the form of government corruption.

37:12 Mark: The irony being that there isn't crime, that that crime isn't happening at least in the way that he thinks it is. The political authority is not in fact in league with the criminal who should be brought to justice. But part of what is interesting. Yeah, just even genre wise about this text is, you know, Mark made the point how sometimes it sort of sounds like an instruction, except now, weirdly, it's not a father instructing his son. Right. It's a peasant instructing political authority. The other genre of texts that I want to bring up, and we didn't read one that I would say is sort of a pure version of this.

However, it is, I think, drawn on not just by the eloquent peasant, but also by the other texts that we will hopefully say something about the dispute between a man and his ba. There's these texts that are just like, about like societies falling apart. Right. And there's this one of these texts, Ipuer I P U W E R. And it's not something that I encourage just to read, but it is something that I want to think about more sometime because to me that is a text, an ancient Egyptian text that I think embraces again I'm trying to, like, not be the one who reads egalitarianism into where it's not.

And I feel like the IPUR text that I'm mentioning is a text that blocks any idea that it's not by someone who is invested in the social hierarchy. Because the apocalyptic language keeps on bringing up how people who were in the sort of the parts they were in, the roles in society that they needed to be, and now, now they're not being listened to and the poor has become the rich. Anyway, without saying anything more about that text, which I want to, you know, take time on sometime to understand on its own terms, the society is falling apart. Language that you find in that text, you also find it here.

But the point here, as I said, is that, like, it's specifically tied to the idea of political authority being in league with corruption and wrongdoing, because that is no longer a simple form of wrongdoing. It is a wrongdoing that multiplies wrongdoing. Because the leader now sets the example. And now the example is, you know, you can take what you want and the nobles can mistreat the presence. That's now the rule.

39:24 Wes: Yeah. All standard evaluation could die away unless it has some kind of functional instantiation on Earth. And then there have to be corrective mechanisms. Right. You get the sense that the officials here are right. They're in the standpoint of the alienation of the master. They use the Hegelian term, and they have to come into contact with someone lower than them to get some reflective position on this. I think that's part of why they are so interested in this. It's like, okay, this is good. Write this down. Right? And don't let them stop talking. Write this down right. Their interest is more than eloquence. They're interested in it because it wisdom. Yeah. They're like, okay, now we're plugged into a corrective mechanism that serves our own reflective function.

40:07 Mark: Yeah. So I think we should finish this off so we can say a few things about the ba. And maybe we can. Wes and Seth and I can contemplate more about that in an informal setting in some future date. But the speeches here go between just sucking up. Oh, you're like the God, you're so. And then sort of conditional sucking up. You're like the God. So the God should support, should do the thing that Akhenaten was saying the son is doing. It should give the shelter. It should point the way. It should be the support for everything. And then just going straight to you son of a bitch. You're just. You're not doing what should be done. You're perverting everything. Two then. No. There's no goodness in the world.

Right, Exactly. No one can walk safely.

40:51 Wes: And there's a lot of job in this, you know. Yes.

40:55 Mark: And so at the conclusion, he's ready for death. He thinks that he has said so many mean things that he's just like, ah, the. Here comes death. A thirsty man's approach to water. An infant's mouth reaching for milk. Thus is a long for death seal coming. Thus does his death arrive at last. And they're just like, surprise, here's all your stuff back.

41:15 Wes: Well, he threatens to go tattle on them to Anubis. Don't forget that part.

41:21 Mark: Right.

41:21 Wes: And that's when they relent. They're like, all right, the jig is up.

41:25 Mark: Yeah.

But I think that's a good transition to the man in his ba. So that is a little story where we don't even have the beginning of, but the.

Right. Which is unfortunate, we should say about that.

So in the Merikare, the ka was brought up several times. So these are the ka and the ba are two parts of the soul.

41:43 Seth: Yeah.

41:43 Mark: How would you characterize the difference between them? Chike? I mean, I know the. The ba has a special role with the afterlife. The ka is more your energy. Yeah. Give me the.

I do think of ka as a sort of vital energy that would be importantly characteristic of you while alive on earth. So to me, the quickest way to isolate what is the ba, right. Is to say that. Okay, well, if we translate it to soul, which Parkinson, for example, calls it the dialogue of a man and his soul, then we really need to emphasize that we mean soul in the sense of when we're imagining that there's something that lives after the body. So, yeah, the soul as manifestation of the person after death. And that's what makes this, like, a very weird text.

And I mean, to me, really, it's just. It's weird in ways that force you to understand that this is a philosophical text. Right. In other words, we're going to have a man talking to. I guess you could say himself. But what does that mean to say he's talking to himself? Well, he's talking to his ba. But the ba is supposed to be what you. How you manifest after death. So how is that even possible for him to be talking to his ba? That's to be one, like, question. And then, weirdly, if the ba is the manifestation of the person after Death. Then you have the other irony.

It is a text in which the man is tired of life and would like to give it up. And it is the ba who is defending the value of life.

43:16 Wes: I still can't help imagining a guy talking to a sheep. I know it's a.

43:22 Mark: That pun has never occurred to me.

43:24 Wes: So I had the association as soon as I saw the title. And then I can't ever get rid of it. This is my problem. So that's like my. My book cover for this in my mind. Right. It's represented often as a bird with a human head. And it's one of several aspects of the soul and ka's life force. Right?

43:47 Seth: Yeah.

43:47 Mark: And there's even supposed to be an idea of the ba and the ka, like finding each other in the afterlife. That's at least something that I've also come across. And making an akh. Akh, like an Akhenaten, an effective one.

So the ka stays near the body in the tomb. So that's why you have the let's bury you with a bunch of food and things, because the ka is still there. The ka.

Oh, really? Okay, I thought it was the ba.

This is what the AI is telling me, that the ka is the spiritual double, but it actually stays with you. And then the ba comes.

44:20 Seth: Right.

44:21 Mark: So you were right that they unite in the tomb, but the ka. Yeah. Anyway, there is a reason why, you know, people got buried with a bunch of food and things because they. They would have a use for it.

44:30 Wes: I think the important part here is the ba is the thing we would associate with personal identity. Right. It's the. So you can say. Right. Is it if my Platonic soul survives and then comes back again. Right. There's nothing personal about that. I could be an entirely different person, but the personal identity seems to be attached to Ba.

44:53 Mark: I'm not sure whether that makes for any contrast between the Ba and the ka. I'm unsure. You know, as I say to me, the.

Yeah.

You have just the basic metaphysical irony, if we can put it that way, of a man who is somehow talking to the manifestation of himself after death. It's not clear to me that there's any other examples of, like, a person talking to his Ba. Like, I've never. I've certainly never heard of that being something that you could find happening in any other text.

So the. At the beginning of the Richard Parkinson translation that you pointed us to, he gives a somewhat different interpretation of it, that it's not just, I want to die and The BA says, no, no, life is great. You should not die yet. Which is. Which does happen. But part of it is also that the BA is like, well, you want to die? Well, screw you. I'm not going to help you die. I'm just gonna go off. And so you're not gonna have a real afterlife. The way Parkinson interprets that is that it is a meditation on different ways of dying. So you could die such that you're just completely obliterated. And that's scary.

Exactly.

But, you know, the funeral rites, the tombs, everything actually makes it sound kind of good. So that some of what the man, it's not just that he's tired of his life, but he's like, looking forward to, I want to do this cool thing. And it's only because his ba, like, well, you don't get to do the cool thing. You don't get to die the honorable way with all the trappings, unless you let it happen naturally. You got to stick in and wait until it is your time if you're going to dive out beforehand. Well, it's like, you know, suicides, go

to hell kind of thing, sort of. And, you know, I will say that there are other Egyptologists who don't interpret it this way, but it really does feel to me like the Parkinson interpretation that you've just summarized certainly makes it the simplest or easiest to understand. Because the problem is what Parkinson is trying to explain away is that it feels like there's a switch. It feels like at first the man is like, hey, stay near, which seems like he likes life and the ba wants to go away, which seems like that's okay. Yes. Yay, death. And then no matter how you read it clearly, those positions then shift.

And so it seems like sometimes people want to say that we've got to just accept that there's a weird shift. And I think, think that Parkinson gives us a way of understanding. No, there's not a weird shift. The seeming like part where the BA is interested in death and the man is interested in life is actually just the man not wanting the BA to depart from him. Because then death will mean just end of existence rather than the journey that the BA is supposed to take for him in the afterlife, or rather the journey that the BA is supposed to be part of.

If we, I guess, continue to think of him somehow as distinguishable.

I thought kind of a weird place in here on page 165. So the BA has. Has said, are you not a man? Are you not alive? What do you gain by Complaining about life like a man of wealth. I will not go so long as this is neglected. Surely if you run away, you will not be cared for. And the man replies to this, if my Ba listens to me without malice, its heart in accord with me, it shall be happy. I shall make it reach the west. West, like one who's in his tomb, which I was thinking of, you know, Lord of the Rings, the elves go to the west. Anyway, that's a metaphor for death whose burial a survivor tends.

I shall make a shelter over your corpse, so you will make envious another Ba in weariness. I will make a shelter. It shall not be freezing, so you will make envious another ba which is hot. I shall drink water at the pond over which I made shade, so you will make envious another Ba that hungers. So bas care about their relative status to other bas, and they want to make all the other bas envious of how nice their burial site is.

48:29 Wes: And.

48:29 Mark: Okay, that is wild. Yeah. I don't know what to make of that.

48:34 Wes: So what is the BA's response here? The crocodile problem comes up again, Right?

48:39 Mark: That's true.

48:40 Wes: You have a scenario in which. Yeah, yeah.

48:42 Mark: What we do definitely have with the Ba right after that part is the treatment of death as loss. So that's this big difference between the man, where the man says, you know, the west is a dwelling place, a voyage. Also, that I think maybe that same part is translated by Parkinson. The west is a harbor. Right. So it's this place that you look forward to arriving at. And then the Ba responds, if you think of burial, it is heartbreak. It is the gift of tears by a grieving man. It is taking a man from his hat, casting him on high ground. So death is homelessness, Right. It is the loss of the home you have known, which is life. So that's the kind of, I think, the big contrast that we then see them sort of sticking with their various positions until the end, where the B.A. i think, sort of unites their perspectives in one in the way that he ends things.

49:39 Wes: Their offering stones are desolate, as if they were the dead who died on the riverbank for lack of a survival. These are the people who build these big monuments. Having a huge monument above you is just like dying on the riverbank. Yeah. The fishes at the water's edge talk to them. That's such a great image.

49:57 Mark: You're talking about the two stories on 165 to 166. Is that what you're. Wes, what you're pointing at?

Well, he was before the two stories. It's the BA who tells the stories, right?

Yep.

And which is. Yeah. Like, it is, I think, to me, the. Some of the most difficult parts of the text to get like. But what does seem to be coming out in the stories is an idea of valuing life and not wanting it to end too soon. Right. Because the first story, there's the idea of weeping for the children who died rather than the adults when it comes to the problem of the crocodile, you know? But then, like, the second one seems to be about, like, wanting dinner before it's time. And so, you know.

Yeah, yeah. You shouldn't want death before it's time.

50:44 Wes: Sure.

50:45 Mark: Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, let me just read that because it's only two sentences long. So. Hey, let me tell you a story to make my point. I'm the Ba. A man asked for an early meal. His wife said, it is for supper. He went outdoors and did something. Maybe we can't read what it says in the papyrus. He went outdoors. He wandered around a while. When he came back to the house, he was like another person. His wife beseeches him, and he does not listen to her. He does something heedless of the household.

Can I give you the Parkinson version?

Yeah, yeah, please.

Equally quick. Yeah. A commoner asks for dinner. His wife says to him, it's for supper time. He goes outside to relieve himself. For a moment, he is like another man as he turns back to his house. And though his wife pleads with him, he does not hear her. After he has relieved himself and the household is distraught. I think it's clear that it's a tough part to translate.

Okay. I think it's Lichtheim in one of the other places, like in. I think it was in the Merikare. Where in the Ptahhotep. Like. Well, this one is about illicit sexual intercourse. And I'm not going to translate it, so maybe she's just a little prudish. Okay. I assumed this was. We can't read what's on the text, but you're saying Jesus didn't want to write relieve himself.

I don't know. Ancient Egyptian was good enough that I could independently comment on that.

But it is pretty strange that. Yeah. What is the moral here? She, his wife is saying, you got to wait till it's time. Like. Like that could be the end of the story. You gotta wait for death, waste time. Oh, but this. If you're like this man who. He just can't wait, and now he's gonna be all hot bellied, hot headed. He's gonna ignore his family, he's gonna destroy everything because he can't just freaking wait till dinner time.

52:24 Wes: Well, he comes back like another person. His impatience makes him another person. And the whole point of the ba to be the same person, person.

52:33 Mark: Oh, well, that's interesting.

52:34 Wes: So there's a sense in which impatience implies a lack of persistence. So ironically, to want to die sooner than one ought not to wait until it comes in the right place is to already have robbed oneself of persistence.

52:51 Mark: All right, we are criminally rushing through this, but we do want to wrap up in the next few minutes. Do we want to say anything about. So the end of this is with the man giving four different little poems. That is, you know, for that sound a little like the eloquent peasant. Like the third one, death is before me today. Like the sick man's recovery, like going outdoors after confinement. Death is before me today, like the fragrance of myrrh. Like sitting under sail on a breezy today, like a man longing to seem his home when he's seen spent many years in captivity. So it's not necessarily. I think people say, maybe you were saying chike, that they've somehow. Yes, at the end the ba says, fine, I'll stick with you. But I'm not sure the guy's still like praising death.

53:32 Wes: Let's say what it is he's concerned about. So in the beginning it's about his name. My name reeks. It sounds like it's about reputation. But then he goes on to say, we've got more than the crocodile problem in Egypt. Hearts are greedy, everyone robs his comrades. Good kindness has perished. It sounds like the. The kinds of generic complaints every era seems to make about itself. Something has gone wrong. Socially, a criminal is one's intimate. The past is not remembered. Brothers are mean, faces are blank.

54:10 Mark: Right, so now you've jumped to whom shall I speak today? Because that's the interesting thing, right? You got more. The more individualistic first part, the low my name reeks part where he is just saying, you know, life stinks and I'm tired of it. And then there's that broadening out to the, like I said, the sort of apocalyptic literature, there's maybe a better word for it. But that like the society falling apart genre, that also exists. That's where he taps into it, into that in that second one. Because now it's not just about my life sucks.

It's like, well, everyone's life sucks. Brothers are mean. The friends of today do not Love everyone robs his comrade. Nothing is going right, you know, and that is what then leads. For the third refrain, death is before me today to talk about just like how great death seems, right, like how it seems like relief from all this badness. And then the final of the poems, the refrain is, well, truly, he who is yonder. But then what comes next in Parkinson. But there a man is a living God punishing the wrongdoer's action. And I'm skipping to the last bit, but there a man is a sage who cannot, when he speaks, be stopped from appealing to the Sun God.

So there's knowledge and freedom and justice in the afterlife that is missing here. So what then does the Ba say back? And I'll also just give us the Parkinson version of that. When my soul said to me, throw complaint over the fence, O my partner, my brother. May you make offering upon the brazier, Brazier I don't know. And cling to life by the means you describe, yet love me here, having put aside the west and also still desire to reach the west, your body making landfall, I shall alight when you are weary, so shall we make harbor together. So that's where the Ba seems at that point.

Say, you know, you're right, life does suck, but you've got to embrace it for all the good that has come out of it. I mean, all the good that don't try and leave it too early. We're both right. Like, embrace life while you can't. Like, like while you have it. But you're right, it's a hard journey. Eventually it's going to be good when we're in the afterlife. That's sort of my take.

56:31 Wes: I think the making of an offering I might be reading into this, though, is suggestive of, you must engage in an act of mourning and not expect more of life than is there. Because you can't go to him and say, well, things are going to get better socially, or things are going to get better for your name. Psychoanalysts would call the sad stuff about the name someone who's concerned about narcissistic injury. And part of what is curative is getting the people to move away from narcissistic injury and towards love. The thing that is mentioned at the end of the it not to worry about one's own reputation, one's name, one's love of oneself, but to make a movement towards love of the world. And that inevitably involves a form of mourning.

57:15 Mark: I was particularly struck the phrasing of the world is going to hell is to whom shall I speak today? That there is. When the Maat, when the organization has been disrupted, then we are literally lonely. We are literally isolated in a way that. Putting that together with just this pretty weird to us picture of. I mean, I guess, yeah, I'm going back to God or whatever. You know, we talk about death in many traditions as. As a homecoming, as a being reunited in some way. But the fact that here it's you being reunited with you, your ka and your ba will come together to make the thing, the. The effective spirit to achieve eternal life. Yeah. They know that there's something very specific. You even need other people to be involved. It's you coming together with you. I just thought that was.

Yeah, but he doesn't make it not social like, because again, that last refrain seems to say that like there's this. The greatest kind of sociality, one where justice and knowledge characterizes it.

Sure.

In his vision of the afterlife. Yeah.

58:19 Wes: And I think the other thing here, Mark is just the right. If I'm right about mourning, then his impulse seems to be to get other people to mourn him and maybe that'll rectify his name, for instance. That connects all of this to having monuments built on top of you. Something about dying might improve you, improve your life by improving you in the memory of others. But the mourning has to be one's own. Mourning, I think, is the point at the end. That solution is not to be in is not. The other is not to be a certain way in the eyes of the other.

58:54 Seth: I found this entire thing really. I know that it was supposed to be the centerpiece of this, you know, of our discussion, but I found it extremely dissatisfying when trying to consider it as I think I'd just been thinking about it wrong. Because to me this is, you know, it's like, okay, it's like, the world is terrible. Life sucks. Want to commit suicide? Okay, here's the arguments against suicide, and it's not that at all. And me thinking that that's what it was is why I think I was so disappointed. The complaint is, to whom shall I turn? There's no justice, right?

Nobody loves me, the world's disordered, blah, blah, blah. And what the soul is basically saying is. And dying now is going to do something about that, that's going to help. He's basically saying, like, there's. That will not solve your problem. You may be suffering, but ending your suffering is not going to make anything better. In fact, it's going to permanently mess you up for the afterlife. It's like, yeah, things are bad, but you know what? You and me, we're in this together. So in a weird way, you know, the suffering and the complaint about suffering is a broader social kind of complaint.

But what the soul is saying is you need to look after yourself and to understand that doing something that's going to permanently damage. I shouldn't say permanently, I should say like in perpetuity damage yourself is not the right response to a world that's disordered. And in that respect that it makes a lot more sense to me now.

1:00:32 Wes: Yeah, I think there's some, a lot there, Seth. I think it's almost like saying suicide as a solution is a misconception of the problem. It's predicated on a kind of category error, probably going too far there and making this too fancy.

1:00:44 Mark: But I don't know about the category. But I mean the non solution that is suicide does seem to be a theme here. And it does. I think one of the things that I take also from this weirdness of talking to the part of you that's supposed to be active after death in this way is that I do therefore read it as about the psychological fragmentation that can accompany mental illness, depression and things of these natures. This feeling of feeling like there's an internal conflict between different parts of the self, like the one that just wants to die or the one that wants to cling to life. And so I do in that way also read the end as a sort of regaining of psychological wholeness.

1:01:29 Wes: When I say it's a misconception of the problem. I think some psychoanalysts would say suicide is actually not. People don't commit suicide because of suffering. They might think they do, but they commit suicide to persist, to persist in an idea. It's like a psychotic fantasy that because a lot of the self attack and suffering comes from this disparity between oneself and one's name, right? The name that reeks the idealized image of oneself. And you want that idealized image to persist. And that's what suicide is about. So that's what I mean by a misconception of the problem.

1:02:05 Mark: Well, I am so glad that Wes for one is clearly seeing the philosophical value and the contemplation of this. Because I know when we have done things like this in the past of like, oh, is it really philosophy? It's so historical, it's so then there's maybe a thought of what are we even doing here? But clearly this was as rich and fertile ground as anything. So I'm Glad everybody see. Well, I don't know about.

Seth.

Seth, do you want to give us a closing here?

1:02:32 Wes: Seth, what would you say to your ba at this moment?

1:02:34 Seth: All right, all right, all right. No, I. We have the same, you know, I'm sure. So there are parts of this that remind me of when we were reading some of the older Chinese texts where the written language and language and forms of expression are literally just evolving. So this is like. This is concept and language going hand in hand. And so I imagine there are these fragments, and the task of trying to reconstruct and make sense of this or even present it as a coherent text for readers like us, I'm sure, is monumental. And I appreciate that. And it's definitely can be a struggle reading it at points because there's not a narrative structure or even a dramatic structure all the time that.

Or an argumentative structure that makes sense. But the one thing that was not the case with this, there's no ambiguity about what is at stake, what the topics are, what's at stake for the people involved in the conversation, and what was being advocated for. And that I found really interesting. And in that way, it differs somewhat from some of the things we read in the really old Chinese texts, where they have a tendency to have ambiguity built in that makes it difficult to hone in. Whereas here it's very clear we're talking about justice. It's very clear we're talking about certain types of law and behavior and things like that.

And I don't know, it was really interesting. So I haven't followed up with you, Chike, but is now, do you have 50 other episodes for every other region and country in Africa for.

1:04:12 Mark: No. There's the short answer to that. But I do hope that, you know, people will, especially at this point. I mean, you know, I always love for people to check out the podcast, but I'm really proud now that we have this first book out, Africana Philosophy from Ancient Egypt to the 19th century. So we divided the podcast into three parts, and this book covers the first two parts. So we'll have a second book that's still in the works, Africana philosophy in the 20th century. Because that third part of the series ended up being longer than the first few parts combined.

A lot of stuff happened in the 20th century. Go figure. But, yeah, it is, as I said at the outset, yeah, interesting and important to me as we track all the more recent stuff that Africans and people of African descent had given to the world that we also take the time to go back to Ancient Egypt. Right. Because it is a remarkable time and place and interesting thoughts came out of it. So it's been a joy to discuss it with you guys. I would say that among philosophy podcasts, I mean, I'm biased enough that I can't say that you're my favorite, but I would say that, I mean, in

other words, favorite unscripted, just say exactly.

Oh, there you go. That works perfectly. Among unscripted philosophy podcasts, you have long been my favorite. I love the just even the format of returning after you've gone on to, you know, you took the path that I took to grad school, all the way to PhD and, you know, philosophy professor path. And I think it's really cool that, really cool how you've continued to stay engaged in the way that you guys do.

1:05:45 Wes: Well, thanks a lot for coming on. This was great.

1:05:47 Mark: Yep. Yeah. So just look up history of Philosophy, history of Africana philosophy. It's actually a different feed than the the main History without any Gaps podcast, but that has. We already drew on it for some of our India stuff and our China stuff. And so here, this was the third part of that feed right now. And folks should reach out to us. Let us know what you want us to cover pel@pre partiallyexaminelife.com or engage us on Facebook x Instagram. Just use the email or comment on the blog post associated with this episode at parsonexaminlife. Com, however you would like. Thanks everybody for listening. Good night, everybody.

1:06:23 Wes: Good night.

1:06:24 Seth: Good night.