ABSTRACT
This chapter presents two of Jacob Klein's chief discoveries from a perspective of peculiar fascination to author: the enchanting contemporaneous significance, the astounding prescience, and hence longevity, of his insights. The first insight takes off from an understanding of the lowest segment of the so-called Divided Line in Plato's Republic. In this lowest segment are located the deficient beings called reflections, shadows, and images, and a type of apprehension associated with them called by Klein 'image-recognition'. The second discovery involves a great complex of notions from which he will extract one main element: the analysis of what it means to be a number and what makes possible this kind of being, and, it turns out, all Being. Jacob Klein reluctance to pontificate was in part indolence, an indolence dignified by his aversion to philosophy carried on as an organized business, and in part pedagogical intention, a conviction that to retail one's thought-products to students was to prevent inquiry.
