The non-philosophical stimulus chosen is the somewhat infamous image of The Falling Man. Filmed on the morning of September 11, 2001 following the terrorist attacks in the United States, The Falling Man captures the dizzying fall of one of the individuals trapped at the top of the World Trade Center after he chose to do so, rather than to wait to be burned alive. by the flames, commits suicide by jumping from the top of one of the towers. Similar actions were taken by as many as two hundred other people. Looking at the photograph, nothing else until now has reminded me so acutely of the concept that Jean-Paul Sartre calls “radical freedom.” The action captured is the epitome of man's ability to exercise free will and challenges other existentialist concepts. Man's fear and discouragement. Man's despair in the face of abandonment. The anxiety felt when we realize that we are the only ones responsible for ourselves and our actions. All these concepts are raised by the stimulus, the expression of freedom conveyed by the choice of the falling man, and we will examine to what extent it is fair to characterize the photograph as 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 not only exposes the freedom attributed to man, through this quote from Sartre's Being and Nothingness, but even illustrates how this freedom can be considered a condemnation. The choice, the ability to commit suicide is somewhat paradoxically the ultimate expression of freedom, but yet the only way to opt out of this freedom. Whatever the motivations, which will be examined later, it cannot be denied that man must chart his own course. This sometimes involves exercising radical freedom in a way that Kierkegaard might call “absurd,” but ultimately it all comes back to this notion: “Man is condemned to be free.” The only slightly problematic issue that remains to be resolved is that suicide is an act of freedom leading to the suppression of our freedom; it's the one thing Sartre claims we are not free to do. While this may be problematic ideologically, in reality it is simply one of the manifestations of an action aimed at the absurd. The Falling Man powerfully demonstrates a real-life manifestation of some of the key existentialist ideals and serves to illustrate them convincingly. Being and nothingness, tr. H. Barnes, London: 1958