Jay,
I appreciate this thread topic, as I myself have felt compelled to understand this act, and why it is so fascinating. In the "Dialectic of Enlightenment" by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, they explain the transformation of art into object of contemplation through the story of Odysseus' escape of the sirens. The Sirens represented a truth, the truth of ones past at the cost of the future. By having himself tied to the mast, Odysseus experiences the sirens from a distance, and knows the song only of its danger since he refuses to enter into the pleasurable trance. Now this is a very brief bastardization of the text, but ultimately Horkheimer and Adorno say that the enlightenment, with its emphasis on instrumental reason, separates us from the natural world because we see it as something other, something we can dominate, and something we can control for the pursuit of our own survival. However, the seduction presented by the sirens, that need to be unified with nature in irrational danger subsists. That need becomes the subject of art, but as the viewers of art, it is only contemplative since we cannot enter into it. Petit was something like odysseus. He was seduced by the towers, his acts irrational, yet to us who watch him, we are inspired understand this desire. We are compelled to ask why? And from this, the thread itself may become a discussion of the many ways we can interpret the man on wire.

ejones
Thanks for the reply, I have read it over many times. I think your overview is very insightful, and possibly very close to understanding the psycho dynamics of why an individual person would feel called to take on such a task. The book you mention sounds like something I would like to read.
May be Philippe is the antithesis to what Thoreau talked about...

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them." - Henry David Thoreau