Chapter 36 The Critique of Association Psychology and the Reality of Simultaneity

Association psychology dominated empiricist thought from the 18th century through Klages' own time. Its basic claim was simple: mental life consists of discrete ideas or impressions that become connected through repeated temporal contiguity. See lightning followed by thunder repeatedly, and the two ideas become "associated"—thunder automatically follows the thought of lightning.

This framework promised to explain all mental phenomena through a single mechanism: association. Memory, recognition, imagination, reasoning, emotion—all supposedly result from ideas becoming linked through experienced contiguity.

Klages argues that this entire edifice rests on fundamental confusions. Association psychology conflates radically different phenomena under a single explanatory principle, treats abstracted elements as if they were primordial givens, and systematically mistakes factual relations for vital connections.

More importantly, it obscures the actual structure of lived experience: how images group themselves through essential kinship, how simultaneity creates real connections through participation in perceptual space, and how temporal distance determines the elective affinity between impressions and phantasms.

This lecture will follow Klages' systematic critique through several stages: the tragic fate of association psychology, the magic formula that explains everything and therefore nothing, the five fundamentally different process groups it conflates, the reality of simultaneity as grounded in perceptual space, and the recovery of depth through distance.

Klages begins by acknowledging that association psychology represented the only large-scale attempt to pursue what he calls "sub-spiritual study of the soul"—an investigation of mental life that does not reduce everything to conscious intellect.

But this attempt suffered a "tragic or rather tragicomic fate of perishing in its inception through deadly self-surrender to the still prevailing mechanics of explanation."

What went wrong? Klages invokes the Hungarian philosopher Menyhért Palágyi's critique of what Palágyi aptly called "association scholasticism." Palágyi identified two fatal flaws:

First flaw: "The assertion of the existence of questionable fabrications might designate a problem but certainly does not solve it, as long as they don't even lead to the question of what links the associated contents."

Simply saying that ideas become "associated" names a phenomenon but does not explain it. What is the actual process by which one idea becomes linked to another? Association psychology provides no answer—it treats association itself as explanatory when it is precisely what needs explaining.

Second flaw: "The usual 'association factors' are simply invented based on logical comparison of the objects of experience."

The theorists identified various principles of association: contiguity in time, contiguity in space, similarity, contrast. But these categories were imposed after the fact, not discovered through genuine investigation.

Palágyi writes: "If one knows that idea a is associated with idea b, one can begin to speculate about the logical relationship between the two ideas; for some kind of logical relationship must certainly be established between two ideas. One will enumerate all possible categories of relations that might prevail between two ideas, and then one can be sure that whenever two ideas x and y are mentioned, there will always be some category box in which the pair of ideas can be accommodated."

This is the scholastic method: construct comprehensive categories, then fit all phenomena into those predetermined boxes. The association theorists might use three, four, or one category—but all were arbitrary impositions rather than discoveries.

The result was a system that explained nothing while appearing to explain everything.

To demonstrate the vacuity of association as an explanatory principle, Klages compiles a list of eighteen diverse phenomena supposedly explained by the same mechanism:

Thinking "through night and wind" when hearing "Who rides so late"
Expecting thunder when the sky is cloudy
Expecting warmth when approaching flame
Connecting rhyming words like dog and bond
Connecting opposites like mountain and valley
Associating properties with things
Associating things with names
Associating names with ideas
Associating sounds with written characters
Recognition
Remembering
Recognizing depicted objects in drawings
Estimating distance visually
Seeing surface roughness
Hearing simultaneous tones as chords
Perceiving tones as having duration
Connecting simple feelings into complex emotions
Moving rhythmically to music

Klages notes he could easily compile 180 or 1,800 such occurrences. His point: "The word 'association' is a magic formula that explains no more and no less than—everything!"

When a principle explains everything, it explains nothing. Why shouldn't we apply it to physical phenomena? "Thus, for example, to the question of why the moon revolves around the earth, one simply answers: due to association!"

This satirical extension reveals the absurdity. Association has become a verbal talisman—invoke it and the explanatory work seems complete, though nothing has actually been explained.

But the problem runs deeper than mere vacuity. Association psychology conflates phenomena that have "no more to do with each other than the association of two simultaneous impressions has to do with the moon's rotation around the earth."

Consider case 12 versus cases 1-2: "In the painted orange, I believe I see an image of the real orange. But has there ever been a sane person who regarded lightning as an image of thunder because they expected to hear thunder when perceiving lightning?"

The painting represents the orange. But lightning does not represent thunder. These are fundamentally different relationships, yet association psychology treats them identically.

Or case 3 versus case 2: "The warmth I expect to feel when approaching my hand to a flame is a property of the flame. But thunder is not a property of lightning!"

Properties belong to things essentially. Sequential events do not belong to each other in the same way. Yet association psychology applies the same explanatory framework to both.

Or cases 8-9: "The recognition of a speech sound or written character understandable to us involves meanings inherent in the sensory facts as their signs... But lightning does not contain thunder—it is at most a harbinger, in no way a sign of thunder."

Signs contain meanings that must be understood. Natural sequences do not contain each other as signs. These require completely different accounts.

From this confusion, Klages extracts five fundamentally different process groups that association psychology illegitimately conflates:

Group I: Habitual sequence of visual meaning units

Example: lightning followed by thunder, or successive lines of a memorized poem.

These are genuinely separate events that become linked through repeated contiguity.

Group II: Combination of properties into the concept of the thing

Example: redness, roundness, firmness combined into "apple."

Properties interpenetrate to form unified objects, not merely follow each other temporally.

Group III: Recognition of the thing in the image of the thing

Example: recognizing a real orange in a painted orange.

This involves representation—one thing standing for another—not mere sequential association.

Group IV: Recognition of the sign through understanding its meaning

Example: recognizing speech sounds or written characters.

This requires grasping meaning inherent in the sign, not just temporal linkage.

Group V: Understanding a fact with the help of the sign for it

Example: all comprehension through language.

This involves semantic content, not mechanical connection.

Klages concludes: "Anyone whose judgment is not hopelessly shattered by association theory must see that its application created a system of confusions that, in the history of thought so far, stands alone in terms of devastating consequences for knowledge formation."

But the confusion extends even further. While these five groups at least involve two distinguishable facts, cases 13 and 14 involve only "a single fact present"—seeing distance in a landscape, or perceiving surface roughness visually.

"If one brings in the position of eye axes, eye movements, internal tactile sensations for explanation of distance perception, or experiences of touching for explanation of roughness perception—these are processes either merely inferred or in exceptional cases only accessible to explicit observation, but in no way contents to be placed alongside the impression of distance or roughness."

Distance and roughness are unitary perceptual givens, not combinations of separate elements. Yet association psychology treats them as if they were compound, requiring explanation through linking of parts.

The fundamental error: "Equating the formation of impressions with the sequence of finished impressions through association gives us an idea of the extent to which previous life sciences are merely a self-misunderstanding mechanism."

Association psychology confuses the process by which impressions form with the subsequent linking of already-formed impressions. This confusion prevents genuine understanding of even the most elementary experiences.

Having identified the confusions, Klages now proposes the key distinction: interpenetration versus mere sequence.

"Of the five two-part groups, only the first seems like a connection of two independent facts, whereas in all the others, from a single fact, two different sides are present which, despite great differences in context, stand in relation to mutual interpenetration."

Thing and property interpenetrate—they form a unity despite being distinguishable aspects. But lightning and thunder merely follow each other—they remain "in strictly separate independence despite their temporal proximity."

Klages provides a powerful example: "Whoever fell in love for the first time during a dance lesson to the sounds of a waltz will still, at fifty, hear this melody and immediately think of the figure, posture, eyes of a girl. Yet the melody remains melody and the girl's image remains the girl's image, and there is not the slightest possibility that they will ever merge into a new whole comparable to what each of them is by itself!"

The temporal association is undeniable. The connection is real. But it does not produce a unified meaning. The melody and the memory remain separate despite their linkage.

This distinguishes mere association from essential connection. Essential connections produce wholes—like thing with properties, or figure with garment, or color with form. Mere associations produce sequences without unity.

Therefore, Klages proposes: "Mere association of impressions never produces units of actual significance."

Significance requires more than temporal contiguity. It requires interpenetration—mutual participation in a unified meaning-structure.

But if association cannot produce significance, what does produce it? Klages' answer: essential kinship and participation in perceptual space.

Klages now reverses the entire framework. Association psychology assumes that discrete elements are primary and wholes are constructed from them. Klages argues the opposite: wholes are primary, and elements are abstracted from them.

"Even all the tangible units one imagines as associated cannot be identical with experienced impression contents but were subsequently extracted from the contexts of image elements and sequences through the work of dissection of understanding thought."

We do not experience isolated elements that then get connected. We experience meaningful wholes that thought subsequently analyzes into parts.

Examples: "To the image of a figure that pleases me also belongs the beautiful garment with which it is clothed. If I separate figure and garment objectively, it is an original connection, comparable to 'warm red,' and by no means something connected by simultaneity which the mind then fragmented into two facts."

Figure and garment form a unity. "Warm red" is a single qualitative experience, not warmth plus redness mechanically linked.

"Every successful painting, every successful building, every successful book title, every chord, every song gives me a whole thanks to the unified unique character, in relation to which only the subsequent decomposition process determines parts and sides."

Art reveals this principle clearly. A successful work has unified character. Analysis discovers parts, but the unity precedes the parts experientially.

Even non-artistic examples: "I can physically view a network in two ways: once as a net, secondly as a tangle of strings. But the wide-meshed net, as long as it is truly what the name implies, appears as a network visually and opens up to symbolic thinking related series—road network, retina of the eye, visceral network."

The network is experienced as network, not as strings arbitrarily connected. The whole determines the meaning of the parts.

This has profound implications: "In principle, the thought linked in whatever sense never requires an explanation, but rather the inner compulsion according to which what belongs together intrinsically and thus internally seems to fall apart to us, and what is only externally together."

The question is reversed. We should not ask how separate elements become connected but rather why unified wholes appear to separate into distinct elements.

Having established that genuine significance requires more than temporal contiguity, Klages now provides his positive account: simultaneity creates real connections through participation in perceptual space.

"As certainly not from the concept of simultaneity an essential connection of simultaneously occurring events would be derivable, such a connection certainly exists when we return to the vital source point of the simultaneity thought."

The abstract concept of simultaneity provides no basis for connection. But the lived experience of simultaneity does.

Why? Because "the mathematical concept of a point in time would not have arisen without the empirical concept of now, and the empirical concept of now would not have arisen without the experience of now, whose visual basis must be sought in the sensory space."

We established in previous chapters that the real now is identical with sensory space. Simultaneity is not an abstract temporal relation but participation in the standing presence of perceptual space.

Therefore: "If we call empirically simultaneous all events that supposedly or actually take place in the empirical now, then everything simultaneously occurring that becomes visually apparent inevitably participates in the image of the sensory space, such that no mood of our conscious state of life can be imagined that is not underlined by the visual image of the surrounding spatiality."

Klages makes a striking claim: "I cannot recall any joy or sorrow or despair without also recalling a place where I either actually lingered during the occurrence of the emotional upheavals in question or that I compulsively imagine."

Try it yourself. Remember any significant emotion. You will find that a place comes with it—a spatial context that frames the experience.

"I would have a feeling suffered at some point simply 'lost from memory' with a complete loss of the ability to assign it to any locality."

Memory of feeling requires memory of place. The two are inseparable because feelings occur within the standing now of sensory space.

This reveals the essential connection: "Thanks to their unavoidable participation in the image of perceptual space, empirically simultaneous soul processes, insofar as they depend on occasions of impression, are linked by a similarity feature."

What makes simultaneously experienced events similar is not their content but their shared participation in the same perceptual space—the same standing now.

This is why simultaneity creates real bonds. Not because of temporal contiguity per se, but because of spatial participation—because all contents of a single perceptual moment belong to the same whole, the same unified spatial presence.

Klages now extends the analysis to memory and temporal distance.

"If the moment of appearance is rooted in the entire prehistory of the life bearer, then shaping of impression images must at least partially depend on it, which we can most easily convince ourselves of with memory images."

Memory images differ from present impressions not just in content but in character. They carry what Klages calls "depth signs of time."

"The inseparable consciousness of the past from the memory image is more precisely consciousness of a temporal distance between the memory phantasm and present impression—a temporal extension backwards whose size is measured by the abundance and variety of impressions experienced in the meantime."

Temporal distance is experienced as depth. Recent memories feel close, distant memories feel deep. This is not metaphor but phenomenological description.

Moreover: "A week rich in 'experiences' seems to stretch to the length of months in retrospect, while one filled with trivialities seems to have passed with hourly speed."

Temporal extension depends not on clock time but on experiential richness.

Now comes the key insight: "Just as facial impressions carry depth signs of space, so do memory images carry depth signs of time, and both are integrated into the contrasts of extreme proximity and extreme distance."

Space has depth—foreground versus background, near versus far. Time has depth—recent versus remote, just-past versus long-ago.

And these structures are parallel: "Not only is night a being, counterpolar to the day being, but also distance is one and proximity counterpolar to it."

Distance is not merely the absence of proximity but a positive quality—a being with its own character.

Therefore: "For the distance-viewing and memory-gifted human, all contents of experience are embedded between two poles appearing in the visual contrast of spatial proximity and spatial distance."

We live within spatial depth (near/far) and temporal depth (recent/remote) simultaneously.

The consequence: "If all images of temporal proximity character are polar opposite to those of temporal distance, everything involved in both the near and far character groups together."

Images group themselves according to their depth character. Recent impressions affiliate with other recent impressions. Remote memories affiliate with other remote memories.

But more: impressions and memories can affiliate across time if they share depth character: "If the expanse and distance of space dominate in the impression image because the soul is captivated by the horizon or starry sky, there is greater essential affinity of impressions with phantasms of the distant past than with those of the near past—as vice versa with the latter in the machinery and street noise of a small town."

Gazing at horizons evokes distant memories. Urban noise evokes recent memories. The spatial character of the impression determines which temporal character of memory it attracts.

Association psychology treats mental life as composed of discrete elements that become connected through temporal contiguity. Klages demonstrates that this framework conflates radically different phenomena, mistakes abstracted parts for experiential givens, and obscures the actual structure of lived experience.

The reality is opposite: wholes are primary, elements are derivative. We experience unified meanings that thought subsequently analyzes into parts. Genuine significance arises not through mechanical association but through essential kinship—through interpenetration of aspects within unified wholes.

Moreover, what association psychology dismisses as "mere coincidence" reveals fundamental truths. Simultaneity creates real connections through participation in perceptual space. All contents of a single moment belong together because they share the same standing now—the same spatial presence.

And temporal distance determines elective affinity. Images group themselves according to depth character. Impressions with far-character evoke memories with far-character. Near attracts near, distant attracts distant.

This recovers the reality that mechanistic thinking obscures: a world where images connect through essential kinship, where simultaneity creates bonds through spatial participation, where depth of vision depends on openness to the distant character of being.

What modern psychology dismisses as "subjective empathy" actually reveals how soul and world interpenetrate. And what it celebrates as "objective explanation" is revealed as a system of confusions standing alone in intellectual history for its devastating consequences.