Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling. Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: ChatGPT (OpenAI). 2026.
The Great Gatsby: The Six Commitments and Their Replacements
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a particularly useful subject for a commitment study because it depicts a society in which wealth, social position, romantic desire, and personal reinvention frequently displace truth and moral responsibility.
The novel does not present a systematic philosophical argument. Its characters instead exhibit practical assumptions about reality, freedom, knowledge, truth, and value. Those assumptions can be mapped against Sterling’s six philosophical commitments.
The central finding is that the novel depicts a world in which the six commitments are either weakly represented or displaced by substitutes that allow people to pursue desire, preserve status, and evade responsibility. This is a literary interpretation, not a claim that Fitzgerald explicitly formulated or endorsed Sterling’s framework.
1. C1 — Substance Dualism
Commitment: Mind and matter are fundamentally distinct.
Probable replacement: Practical materialism—the reduction of personal worth to wealth, possessions, physical attractiveness, and social position.
The novel’s society treats material circumstances as if they determine a person’s identity and worth. Gatsby’s mansion, automobile, clothes, and lavish parties are instruments through which he attempts to establish himself as someone worthy of Daisy.
Yet Gatsby’s inner life cannot be reduced to his possessions. His capacity to imagine an ideal future, sustain an intention, and organize his life around a conception of value exceeds what his wealth can explain.
- Gatsby: Attempts to establish personal identity through material display.
- Tom Buchanan: Treats wealth, inherited status, and physical dominance as expressions of superiority.
- Daisy Buchanan: Moves within a social world in which wealth and security are inseparable from romantic and personal value.
- Nick Carraway: Gradually distinguishes outward appearances from the character of the people who produce them.
Finding: The novel depicts practical materialism more clearly than it establishes any metaphysical position about the relation between mind and matter. C1’s replacement is therefore an interpretive analogy, not a direct philosophical doctrine of the novel.
2. C2 — Metaphysical Libertarianism
Commitment: Human beings possess genuine freedom of choice; their decisions are not wholly determined by prior conditions.
Probable replacement: Self-invention constrained by social circumstances, personal history, and entrenched habits.
Gatsby is the novel’s most obvious representative of self-creation. He transforms himself from James Gatz into Jay Gatsby and attempts to construct a life that will make his ideal future possible.
His project embodies a powerful belief in agency. But Gatsby also assumes that he can recover the past and reproduce an idealized relationship with Daisy. His freedom becomes entangled with an inflexible conception of what his life must accomplish.
Tom, by contrast, behaves as if his inherited position entitles him to act without meaningful restraint. Daisy retreats into the protection of wealth and social privilege. Neither character displays Gatsby’s sustained effort to reconstruct himself.
- Gatsby: The self as a project of deliberate creation.
- Tom: The self as entitled by inherited status and power.
- Daisy: The self protected by social circumstances and avoidance.
- Nick: The self as a moral observer who must judge what he witnesses.
Finding: Gatsby exemplifies an aspiration toward freedom, but the novel questions whether imaginative determination is sufficient to overcome reality. His failure does not prove determinism; it exposes the limits of treating freedom as the power to make reality conform to one’s intentions.
3. C3 — Ethical Intuitionism
Commitment: Fundamental moral truths can be apprehended through rational moral intuition rather than derived entirely from empirical facts, social conventions, or desires.
Probable replacement: Sentiment, romantic idealization, conventional morality, and personal desire.
The novel contains moral judgments, but its characters frequently substitute emotional intensity or social approval for moral discernment.
Gatsby treats his ideal of Daisy as if the strength and persistence of his love could establish the rightness of his project. But wanting Daisy, loving Daisy, and having sacrificed for Daisy do not establish that he is entitled to possess her or demand that she erase her past.
Tom’s conduct reveals a different substitution. He defends racial and social hierarchies while behaving hypocritically in his own marriage. His moral language functions largely as a defense of privilege.
Daisy’s choices are similarly entangled with comfort and security. She does not have to establish that her conduct is morally right if she can retreat into the protection of her social position.
Nick, however, repeatedly makes judgments that go beyond mere descriptions of preference. He becomes increasingly critical of Tom and Daisy’s irresponsibility and of the destruction their actions leave behind.
Finding: The novel dramatizes the difference between feeling strongly that something is valuable and recognizing that something is morally good. Its moral perspective is compatible with ethical intuitionism, particularly through Nick’s judgments, but the novel does not explicitly establish intuitionism as its philosophical foundation.
4. C4 — Foundationalism
Commitment: Knowledge and justified belief ultimately rest on foundational truths or justified starting points that do not depend entirely on further beliefs.
Probable replacement: Wealth, reputation, inherited status, and socially accepted appearances as assumed foundations of value.
In the world of The Great Gatsby, money often functions as an unquestioned justification. Wealth appears to establish credibility, confer desirability, and insulate people from the consequences of their conduct.
Gatsby’s parties illustrate the problem. Their size and extravagance produce social attention, but the guests’ presence does not establish their loyalty or even their knowledge of their host. Public recognition substitutes for genuine knowledge.
Tom’s inherited position provides another apparent foundation. His status enables him to treat his assumptions as authoritative and his conduct as defensible. Yet the novel exposes the moral emptiness of that authority.
Gatsby himself constructs a different foundation: the conviction that his idealized past with Daisy supplies the governing purpose of his life. Instead of critically examining that conviction, he organizes his future around it.
Finding: The novel depicts false foundations of practical judgment. Wealth, reputation, and romantic ideals are treated as self-justifying, even though none establishes moral worth. This is a literary parallel to foundationalism’s concern with what ultimately justifies belief, not a rejection of epistemological foundationalism itself.
5. C5 — Correspondence Theory of Truth
Commitment: Truth consists in a proposition’s corresponding to reality.
Probable replacement: Appearance, performance, selective disclosure, and wishful thinking as substitutes for truth.
This is arguably the novel’s most prominent commitment-related conflict.
Gatsby constructs a public identity that obscures his origins. His wealth and mansion help sustain an image of success, while rumors about his past circulate among people who know little about him. His biography becomes a performance designed to produce a particular response.
His relationship with Daisy introduces a deeper problem. Gatsby wants Daisy to say that she never loved Tom. He does not merely want a future with her; he wants the past itself to conform to his preferred account of it.
That demand reveals the difference between changing reality and changing one’s interpretation of reality. Gatsby cannot make Daisy’s previous choices cease to have occurred.
Nick’s narration complicates the issue further. He presents himself as unusually tolerant of others’ perspectives, but he is also a selective narrator whose judgments develop as the story progresses. Readers must distinguish what happened, what Gatsby believes happened, what other characters claim, and what Nick concludes.
Finding: The novel strongly exposes the consequences of replacing correspondence with wishful thinking and social performance. Gatsby’s tragedy is partly epistemic: he mistakes the power of an idealized representation for the power to alter what is true.
6. C6 — Moral Realism
Commitment: Moral facts and truths exist independently of what individuals or societies happen to believe or approve.
Probable replacement: Social conventionalism, self-interest, and class privilege functioning as practical substitutes for objective moral standards.
The strongest evidence appears in the contrast between the consequences suffered by different characters and the consequences they evade.
Tom and Daisy cause or contribute to serious harm, but their wealth allows them to retreat from the consequences. Nick’s final judgment of them emphasizes their carelessness and their ability to leave others to deal with the damage.
Their ability to escape accountability does not make their conduct morally right. The novel’s moral force depends on the reader recognizing a distinction between what society permits and what people ought to do.
Gatsby is not presented as an uncomplicated moral exemplar. His criminal associations, deception, and obsessive pursuit of Daisy complicate any simple celebration of him. Nevertheless, his capacity for hope and commitment contrasts with the carelessness of those who use other people and then withdraw into privilege.
Nick’s developing assessment of Gatsby is also important. He can recognize something admirable in Gatsby’s capacity to hope without endorsing everything Gatsby does.
Finding: Moral realism is strongly compatible with the novel’s moral architecture. The narrative repeatedly invites judgments that cannot be reduced to social acceptance, personal desire, or the distribution of power. However, this is evidence of a moral-realist reading, not proof that Fitzgerald explicitly subscribed to a developed theory of moral realism.
Comparative Summary
C1 — Substance Dualism
Probable replacement: Practical materialism.
Personal worth is measured through wealth and outward display, although inner life exceeds material status.
C2 — Metaphysical Libertarianism
Probable replacement: Self-invention constrained by circumstances.
Gatsby attempts to create himself but mistakes determination for the power to reconstruct the past.
C3 — Ethical Intuitionism
Probable replacement: Sentiment and conventional morality.
Desire, romantic idealization, and social approval compete with independent moral judgment.
C4 — Foundationalism
Probable replacement: Wealth and status as assumed foundations.
Social position and romantic ideals are treated as self-justifying grounds of judgment.
C5 — Correspondence Theory of Truth
Probable replacement: Appearance and wishful thinking.
Constructed identities and idealized memories compete with facts that cannot be changed by desire.
C6 — Moral Realism
Probable replacement: Social conventionalism and self-interest.
Wealth and privilege insulate characters from consequences but do not erase moral responsibility.
Overall Assessment
The commitments are not equally visible in the novel.
- Strongest thematic evidence: C5, correspondence theory of truth, and C6, moral realism.
- Substantial but indirect evidence: C2, libertarian freedom, and C3, ethical intuitionism.
- More interpretive mappings: C1, substance dualism, and C4, foundationalism.
The distinction matters. The novel directly dramatizes deception, self-creation, moral judgment, and the corrupting influence of status. It does not directly resolve the metaphysical relation between mind and matter or the epistemological dispute over foundationalism.
The most revealing contrast is between Gatsby and Tom and Daisy. Gatsby’s governing error is that he makes his own ideal the measure of reality. Tom and Daisy’s governing error is that they treat their social position as sufficient justification for their conduct. One attempts to make reality conform to desire; the others use privilege to escape reality’s consequences.
Nick’s developing judgment provides the novel’s principal counterweight to both errors. He increasingly distinguishes appearance from truth, desire from moral worth, and social power from moral justification.
Final Finding
The Great Gatsby can be read as a study of what happens when the practical substitutes for the six commitments govern human life. Its tragedy is not simply that Gatsby fails to achieve his dream. It is that the characters inhabit a moral and epistemic environment in which wealth, fantasy, and social protection repeatedly displace truth and responsibility.
