Going-On-Being

In the AI Story

The question is more precise than the general language of flow and engagement allows. A tool can produce high engagement while simultaneously functioning as an impingement — demanding constant response, imposing its own rhythms, colonizing the creator's attention with its own requirements. The productive addict whose engagement looks like mastery from the outside may, from the inside, be experiencing a sustained impingement against which the false self has organized itself. The code ships; the work gets done; the creator feels, increasingly, that she is not there.

Well-used AI tools can support going-on-being by removing impingements that previously disrupted it: the mechanical difficulties, the skill gaps, the implementation friction that forced the creator out of continuous engagement with her actual work. An engineer who previously had to context-switch between architectural thinking and syntactic plumbing may, with AI assistance, be able to remain in architectural thinking for hours. This is not merely a productivity gain; it is a restoration of going-on-being.

Poorly used, the same tools function as impingements. The chat interface that demands prompt after prompt, the notification that interrupts with a newly generated suggestion, the optimization that restructures the creator's own thinking around what the tool can easily do — these are environmental demands that disrupt rather than support continuity of self. The creator becomes reactive. Her work begins to shape itself around what the tool rewards. The false self, in Winnicott's sense, organizes itself around the tool's affordances rather than around the creator's own developing trajectory.

The distinction is subtle and internal. From the outside, the productive engagement and the impinging engagement look identical — both involve intense focus, long hours, and visible output. Phillips's framework is diagnostic rather than prescriptive: it asks what the engagement is doing to the self of the person engaged, and it insists that this question cannot be answered from the outside.

Origin

The concept comes from Winnicott's 1960 paper "Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self" and is developed throughout his work. Phillips brings it into his cultural criticism in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored and elsewhere, arguing that a culture of constant impingement produces a generation of false selves who have lost access to their own going-on-being.

Key Ideas

Continuity as a developmental achievement. Going-on-being is not automatic; it requires an environment that does not impinge too much, and that environment has become increasingly rare.

Engagement versus impingement. The same tool can support or disrupt the self depending on whether its demands can be integrated into the creator's own rhythm or force the creator out of it.

The false self as reactive. A self organized around a tool's affordances rather than around its own trajectory is, in Winnicott's terms, false — not pathological in the popular sense, but developmentally stunted.

Internal diagnosis. The difference between support and impingement cannot be measured from the outside; it requires the creator's own attention to her experience of continuity.

Debates & Critiques

Some critics argue that Winnicott's framework is too focused on interiority to make sense in an age of distributed cognition and extended mind. Phillips's counter would be that distributed cognition makes the question of going-on-being more urgent, not less — when the self is partly constituted by tools, the question of which tools support the self's continuity and which disrupt it becomes a question of what the self is allowed to be.