Association School

The Association School appears as a target in Sartre’s critique of theories that treat mental impressions as self-contained states linked only by external contiguity. Its account, he argues, cannot explain succession: before and after connect experiences only if temporal unity is already at work within them.

The School’s Place in the Argument

Sartre introduces the Association School while examining whether temporality can be understood as separation. The school’s account treats impressions as connected by external bonds, and ultimately reduces associative connection to the relation of before and after, understood as simple contiguity. The issue is not whether impressions can occur in sequence, but whether a sequence of isolated impressions can explain how one is actually prior to another.

This example belongs to a broader challenge to explanations that make relations merely external to the things related. If each impression is complete in itself, the relation between impressions has no basis in either one. The Association School therefore serves as a test case for whether the mind’s connections can be explained without presupposing a unifying temporal structure.

The Problem of Isolated Impressions

Sartre sets the school’s associative model against a conception in which each impression exists in itself: complete, isolated in its present plenitude, and containing no trace of either future or lack. He associates this model with the claim that examination of any impression, strong or weak, reveals nothing beyond the impression itself. Hume’s challenge is presented as an effort to establish that claim from experience, leaving the connection between an antecedent and a consequent unintelligible, however constant it may be.

On this account, the temporal contents A and B are each self-identical and self-enclosed. Yet calling A prior to B demands more than placing two independent contents beside one another. If A’s priority were conferred only when B appeared, A would have to receive its determination in B; if the relation were purely external, it would remain suspended between them, unable to affect either content. The assumed completeness of each impression thus conflicts with the very connection the school needs to explain.

Temporal Unity as a Condition of Association

Sartre’s response is that association itself presupposes a unity of experience. Drawing on Kant, he argues that temporal change must already be unified for even the slightest empirical association to be conceivable. Before and after are not simply a link added from outside: the relation both divides temporal contents and reunites them, allowing thought to pass from one to the other and judge their succession.

For A to be prior to B, A must, in its very being, point toward B as its future. Conversely, B must in some way linger behind itself in A, which gives it the sense of being posterior. Neither content can therefore be understood as wholly sealed within its own instant. The Association School’s appeal to contiguity fails as a complete explanation because succession requires an internal relation that the model of self-contained impressions excludes.

Significance in Sartre’s Critique

The school’s role is precise: it illustrates the limits of reducing temporal connection to an external bond between independently complete mental states. Sartre does not treat the mere occurrence of impressions as sufficient to establish succession; temporal order has to be intelligible within the relation of the contents themselves. His criticism turns the school’s explanatory claim against it: association cannot account for before and after unless the unity that makes temporal relations possible is already assumed.