2-3. Nature and the Body as Blood and Heredity; Heredity as Truth

Odysseus is shipwrecked on the island Phaeakia. He has been stripped of literally everything, including his clothes. The princess Nausicaa is on the beach with her consorts engaged in the age-old renewal and purification ritual of washing and airing out clothes. Odysseus boldly approaches her completely naked; the servants are frightened and run, but he manages, naked and stripped of every outward mark of power and wealth, to reconstruct his kingly status through the power of aristocratic speech and of his bearing. The true measure of the man, his nature, is in all these cases revealed: heredity and blood become apparent in body. Reduced to mere body, to utter destitution, a shipwreck, or, in the case of his father Laertes, to an unkempt tiller of the soil, the blood of a king, and the fact of heredity--the phusis, nature, the truth about a being--reveals itself precisely in this reduction to bare biology.