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 are 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 poses a much larger philosophical question: What is the  fundamental 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. 

According to Nietzsche, we are ‘free to choose’ precisely to the extent that we  understand that ‘choice’ is a meaningless concept. Choice presupposes  ‘evaluation’ and evaluation implies Value. Merely random selection is not  choice! So per Nietzsche, Freedom and Value are mutually exclusive.

Janice offers a kinder, gentler version of Nietzsche. She does not deny the  existence of real value, far from it, but she sees our pursuit of value as a  sacrifice of freedom.  

At the other end of the spectrum, Nietzsche’s contemporary, Pope Leo XIII, came to the precisely opposite conclusion. According to Leo, one is free only when and to the extent that one is maximizing value. Leo argues that no sane person would ever choose less value over more, unless he 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’ by my alcoholism to choose the lesser value, immediate gratification, over the greater value, recovery and good health. 

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

Between Nietzsche and Leo we find a more mainstream existentialist  interpretation: By choosing, we assign value. We do not choose in  consideration of inherent value; we create value by choosing. “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. We make life changing decisions in the same way New  Yorkers decide which MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL teams to root for.  

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 deceptively complex. So much so that it is almost universally  misinterpreted. 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: the experience of the  journey itself. 

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 he has no useful information about either of the two alternative paths: “both that morning equally lay.” His choice, no matter how he  dresses it up, is random.  

Faced with a similar dilemma, some folks will flip a coin: they subcontract  their existential freedom to the vicissitudes of pure chance. Not Frost! Being  human, Frost is intent on giving his ‘choice’ meaning. He cannot not choose, but neither can he tolerate the idea that his choice is random. He feels  compelled to manufacture ‘significance’…even if there isn’t any. Like Einstein,  he cannot accept the fact that God plays dice.  

So Frost invents a value scale that suits him and uses it to give his decision meaning. By choosing he 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 paths; he  concludes: “…that has made all the difference.”  

By labeling his randomly chosen path as “the one less traveled,” Frost begins  to construct the 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 a series of stories I tell myself about myself. The subjective form that I give to my essentially random acts becomes the thread of the narrative that constitutes my life. 

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; 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 while we are making random choices, and we confer value on certain choices according to how we label them. 

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. 

So, what say you, dear reader?

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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.