Philosophical Analysis of a Non-Philosophical Stimulus

The non-philosophical stimulus chosen is the somewhat infamous picture of The Falling Man. Taken on the morning of September 11th, 2001 following the terrorist attacks on the United States, The Falling Man captures the headlong fall of one of the individuals trapped at the top of the World Trade Centre after he chose to, rather than await being burnt alive by the flames, take his own life by jumping from the top of one of the towers. Similar actions were taken by as many as two hundred other people. Upon seeing the photograph, nothing else to date has so sharply recalled the concept which Jean-Paul Sartre calls ‘Radical Freedom’ to my mind. The action captured is the epitome of man’s ability to exercise his free will and calls into question other existentialist concepts. The fear and despondency of man. The despair of man in face of abandonment. The anguish felt when we realise we are the only one’s responsible for ourselves and our actions. All of these concepts are raised by the stimulus, the expression of freedom conveyed by the falling man’s choice, and it will be examined to what extent it is fair to call the photograph a visual encapsulation of existentialist thought.

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” The stimulus exhibits not only the freedom attributed to man, by this quotation from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, but even exemplifies in what way this freedom may be considered a condemnation. The choice, the capacity to take one’s own life is somewhat paradoxically the ultimate expression of freedom, but yet the only way to unsubscribe from this freedom. Regardless of the motivations, which will be examined later, there can be no denying of how ...

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...nal to appeal to, man must make his own way. Sometimes this involves exercising radical freedom in what Kierkegaard might call ‘absurd’ ways, but ultimately it all comes back to this notion: ‘Man is condemned to be free’. The only slightly problematic matter remaining to be resolved is that suicide is an act of freedom leading to the removal of our freedom; the only thing which Sartre claims we are not free to do. Whilst ideologically this is perhaps problematic, in actuality it is simply one of the manifestations of an action aiming to the absurd. The Falling Man powerfully demonstrates a real life manifestation of some of the key existentialist ideals and serves to exemplify them cogently.

Works Cited www.wikipedia.org Fromm, Erich, Remarks on The Problem of Free Association, Tübingen: 1955

Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, tr. H. Barnes, London: 1958