Janis Joplin and Robert Frost

Robert Frost is a B-list poet. He’s an American icon who spoke at JFK’s inauguration, but he is not normally included in the Pantheon. There’s no shame in that. As a D-lister myself, I am in awe of Frost; but the A-List is hard to crack. Among Anglophone poets alone, you’re competing with Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Yeats, Hopkins, Eliot, Dylan and Dylan. 

That said, Frost’s The Road Not Taken is one of the most important poems ever written in any language. It touches on themes ranging from Quantum Mechanics to Human Psychology…and unifies them. It addresses issues like teleology vs. causality and free will vs. determinism. 

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” is one of Janice Joplin’s most quoted lyrics. In context (Me and Bobby McGee), Janice may be referring to the fact that one is ‘free’ when one is no longer tethered to a significant other. But her meme suggests a much larger philosophical question: What is the relationship between Freedom and Value?

Perhaps Janice is channeling Nietzsche: “…One belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole!” (Twilight of the Idols)

Nietzsche recognized that the concept of Value requires a hierarchical model of Being – an idea he abhorred. So, intellectually honest to a fault, he rejected the concept of Value outright. Choice presupposes ‘evaluation’ and evaluation implies Value. Merely random selection is not choice! So per Nietzsche, Freedom and Value are mutually exclusive.  

According to Ole Nietzsch’, we are ‘free to choose’ precisely to the extent that we understand that Choice is a meaningless concept. (He prefers Fate.) Choices, to the extent they are motivated, are not ‘choices’ at all. Or rather, they are not our choices; they are choices the Universe makes for us. 

That’s what ‘motivation’ is – cosmic concerns impinging on one’s personal, amoral agenda. My parents tried to ‘motivate’ me to do better in school. I had other things in mind for my precious 10^th year of life. Doing well in school was their concern, not mine, but I was the one who experienced the motivation. 

All motivation is extrinsic; it’s one way I feel the presence of ‘(the) other(s)’ in my life. It is the underside of my Subjective Aim, i.e. what I wish to be - for me. The distinction is subtle, but real, and crucial. Motivation is passive (‘I am motivated’) vs. ‘I aim’. 

I become is passive. What I ‘become’ is logically prior to the ‘me’ who becomes it. I inherit what I become. One becomes an astronaut; one does not become an artist, an inventor, an entrepreneur. ‘I come to be’ is active; I am logically prior. I create what it is that I come to be.

Janice offers a kinder, gentler version of Nietzsche. She does not deny the existence of real Value, far from it, but she sees pursuit of value as a voluntary sacrifice of freedom. It’s a trade-off. 

For Nietzsche, ‘Doing Good’ is simply an illusion; for Joplin on the other hand, Doing Good is good, but ultimately, it’s also suicidal. I become less so that others may become more; like Jesus, we sacrifice ourselves for others:

“Greater love hath no man (sic) than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15: 13)

“Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, it remains a kernel. But if it dies it bears much fruit.” (John 12: 24)

At the other end of the spectrum, Nietzsche’s contemporary, Pope Leo XIII, came to the precisely opposite conclusion: Freedom and Value are inseparable. According to Leo, one is free only when, and to the extent that, one maximizes value. Leo argues, convincingly, that no ‘sane’ person would ever choose less value over more unless she were constrained to do so. 

I am in a bar with a tall pour of scotch in front of me. I know that my ‘best’ choice is to leave the scotch unsipped and walk home; but I drink it anyway. I am constrained or motivated by my alcoholism to choose the lesser value, immediate gratification, over the greater value, good health.  

Leo is normally thought of as the anti-Marx…and not without reason; but perhaps he should also be known as the anti-Nietzsch’.

Between Nietzsche and Leo, but perpendicular to the almost Christian Joplin, we find Existentialism (e.g. Sartre): by the act of choosing we assign value. We can map these disparate views as follows:

Sartre

∕          ∖

Nietz        Leo

∖          ∕

Joplin

We do not choose in consideration of inherent value; we create value when we choose: “Ye are gods!” (Psalm 82: 6) 

Well, actually, ‘Ye are Frosts’! We make choices, often willingly, sometimes enthusiastically, even though there are no objective criteria guiding those choices, but once made, those choices become moral imperatives. They thereby acquire value. 

We make life changing decisions in the same way spectacle-rich New Yorkers decide which MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL teams to root for, subjectively, arbitrarily.

We live in New England. Some of us have never been West of the Mississippi (heck, some of us haven’t been West of the Hudson – our insularity can be a source of pride). Yet we love the Cowboys and hate the Raiders… We can introduce conflict when none exists…and we can become passionate about it. 

Let’s drop in on Frost during his famous ‘walk in the woods’:

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…long I stood and looked down one as far as I could…then took the other just as fair…Both that morning equally lay…I kept the first for another day…I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

The poem is deceptive. So much so that it is almost universally misunderstood. Like an all-pro NFL running back, it feints right before it cuts hard, to the left.  

Frost is confronted with a binary choice. Either choice will lead him equally well to his destination, so his choice has no extrinsic consequences. The only consequence is intrinsic: his experience of the journey itself. And about this he can only conjecture; he had no actual information. He is flying blind.

I have to fly…to Seattle. I am weighing two alternatives. I can fly coach, change planes in Philly and reach my destination in 10 hours for $500. Or I can fly direct to Seattle, business class, in just 6 hours for $1,000; both get me to my destination in plenty of time for my meetings the next day.  My decision has no extrinsic consequence; but the intrinsic consequences are significant.

Objectively speaking, Frost’s ‘choice’ is not a choice at all. Either way, he will reach his destination, and his choice is not informed by any useful information about either of the two alternative paths: “both that morning equally lay.” 

Frost’s choice, no matter how he dresses it up, is effectively a coin toss; but there’s no ego reward in that. So, he creates his own rationale to justify his choice and reinforce his precious self-image. 

Frost imagines himself an explorer, an adventurer, a taker-of-risk and so he paints his groundless decision in just those colors. Doing so, he guarantees himself a smug and self-satisfied old age. 

According to the Dogma of 20^th century Existentialism, the greatest sin, the sin against the Holy Spirit, the sin that cannot be forgiven, is the sin of ‘bad faith’. We are guilty of bad faith whenever… (1) we act, but do not accept responsibility for our actions, or (2) we act, and pretend, to ourselves and others, that our actions are motivated by objective considerations rather than subjective preferences. 

But the case of Frost v Frost presents us with an unusual twist. Does Frost ‘pretend’ to himself and others that his actions are extrinsically motivated? The answer is: Yes! “I shall be telling this with a sigh…I took the one less traveled by.” But Frost is fully aware of what he’s doing; he calls himself out! So is he guilty of bad faith…or not?

Frost’s complex psychological motivations seem incongruous with his homespun literary style. The dichotomy is what gives the poem its tension and makes its straightforward interpretation so challenging. It screams one thing while it actually says the opposite. 

Faced with a similar dilemma (paths, woods, a CNN film crew broadcasting it all live from the tree tops), some folks would be content just to flip a coin: they would willingly subcontract their existential freedom to the vicissitudes of pure chance. Not Frost! 

Being human, Frost is intent on giving his ‘choice’ meaning, whether or not such meaning exists in any objective sense. He cannot not choose, but neither can he tolerate the idea that his choice is random. He feels compelled to invent ‘significance’…even if there isn’t any. 

Like Einstein, Frost cannot accept the idea that God spends his evenings at the Craps table whenever he visits the Bellagio. (But unlike Einstein, Frost knows he does, because he often plays right alongside him at the high rollers’ table – apparently science and the arts pay better than we’ve been led to believe.)

So Frost invents a value scale that reinforces his somewhat adolescent self-image – we are not far from armored knights hunting dragons in Celtic forests – and he uses that scale to give his random decisions a veneer of intentionality, and therefore meaning. 

It is his act of choosing that designates the road chosen as ‘the one less traveled’, even though there is no objective evidence that that is the case. He then defines himself as someone who follows less traveled pathways, and he concludes: “…that has made all the difference.” 

He has manufactured a value system out of whole cloth, and he uses the resulting gradations to label his randomly chosen path ‘less traveled’, which translates into ‘better’ in Frost’s private language. So Frost begins (or continues) his lifelong project: the construction of a narrative that will come to be known as his life: “I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence: two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less traveled by...” 

The meaning of Frost’s choice comes entirely from the ‘subjective form’ (Whitehead) he gives to his actions. My Life is nothing but a series of stories I tell myself about myself to myself (and others) based on an essentially random sequence of events. The subjective aim that I attribute to my actions becomes the thread of the My Life narrative (Rob Lowe has contracted to play me in the movie version.)

Barely 40, Frost had already outlined his autobiography, written his epitaph, and delivered his eulogy – not bad for someone who lived well into his ‘80s.

So the relationship between Freedom and Value is complex…and remains unresolved: According to Nietzsche, Value and Freedom are incompatible, even anathematic. We are free; because there is no Value!

Joplin agrees that Value and Freedom are incompatible, but she permits them to coexist on a continuum; we sacrifice Freedom when we pursue Value.

According to Frost, neither Freedom nor Value are objectively real. We imagine we are free when we are in fact making random choices and arbitrarily conferring value on those choices. 

Finally, Pope Leo: Far from being incompatible, Value and Freedom are inextricable. We are free to the extent and only to the extent that we pursue Value.

And you, dear reader, what say you now?

***

Image: Hopper, Edward. Automat, 1927. Oil on canvas, 28 inches by 36 inches. Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa.

Edward Hopper’s Automat captures the still, inward tension of individual isolation and the quiet gravity of decision-making. The lone woman seated in the café evokes a moment of introspection, possibly in the wake of a choice, or just before one is made. Like Robert Frost’s walker in the woods, she is poised between paths, caught in the suspension of meaning that emerges only after the fact. The painting offers no narrative resolution, only the weight of interiority, similar to our essay’s argument that the consequence of a choice lies not in its external impact, but in the subjective meaning we assign to it after the moment has passed.