RETURNING TO THE THEME OF THE SOUL AND MEMORY

 SK's central complaint against philosophy, and which he illustrates in the PF, is that it must always remain in the realm of the subjunctive, or, the merely possible. It  is always written, whether that is evident or not, in the mode of the Kantian "als-ob".(Vaihinger). Even those philosophers who claim to access Being, the philosophers of presence condemned by Derrida and company, present a virtual or hypothetical, a thought Being, rather than the lived experience of being, according to SK.

This pays off in a particular way in Plato's ideas about the immortal soul. What Socrates thinks he can prove, that there is an immortal soul in every human body, means in practice that what Socrates is committed to proving is that there is an hypothetical rational soul, a purely rational soul, but not an individual, existing soul. What I mean is that the soul Socrates argues for, the soul that can be reminded of timeless truths and thereby, indirectly, of its own timelessness, has only an accidental, that is an inessential, connection to the lived consciousness of the individual, the memory of which will become irrelevant to the real rational soul, as soon as the soul is separated from the body. With death, whatever memories and feelings and experiences made up the individual, disappear because individual histories, for Plato and the later Platonists, mean nothing. 

Two related points:

First, the logical outcome of this Platonic view of the soul is that there cannot ultimately be any ore than one soul, a single reasoning timeless Being into all individual 'shards' or refractions or instances necessarily return when the individual dies. We certainly find echoes of this idea in Plotinos and in the work of several of the Islamic and Jewish Platonists/Aristotleians like Averroes and Avicenna and Maimonides who worked during the Christian Middle Ages.

This also leads to the accusation that Spinoza was a pantheist and to Leibniz' doctrine of the monad, which recapitalutes all reasoning and knowing in its own aspect/perspectival knowing of the world.