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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 1, Ambiguity and Freedom.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How does Beauvoir compare Marxism to existentialism?
(a) Marxism rejects the idea of inhuman objectivity and locates itself in the tradition of Kant and Hegel.
(b) Marxism rejects the moral foundations of law that are rooted in the protection of public property.
(c) Marxism rejects the idea of authority in the development of organized masses.
(d) Marxism establishes moral thought through mass rejection of the moral order.

2. How does Beauvoir identify dualism?
(a) They are thinkers that believe that the only two human values are life and death.
(b) They are thinkers that establish a hierarchy between body and soul.
(c) They are thinkers that set to prove that each life has a dual existence in a different dimension.
(d) They are thinkers that claim that each individual is destined to live a brief physical life and an eternal spiritual life.

3. What is the paradox with which Beauvoir closes Chapter One?
(a) Man is a being that, "in order to know the existence of achievement he must face the nothingness of failure."
(b) "Man cannot know existence without first knowing his nothingness."
(c) Man as an individual is, "At once alone in himself which makes up the mass of universality."
(d) In order to fill his existence, man must assume himself as a being who, "makes himself a lack of being so that there might be being."

4. What irony does Beauvoir suggest contributes to the most optimistic ethics.
(a) That although ethics are pursued to define man's existence, they always lead to ambiguity.
(b) That they have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man.
(c) That although they seek to lift man to utopia, the eventually lead man to distopia.
(d) That all ethics eventually lead man to rationalize violations of their ethics.

5. How does Beauvoir explain that Marxists perceive that acts can be regarded as good or bad?
(a) Through the revolt of a class which define aims and goals from a which a new state appears as desirable.
(b) Only through the destruction of private property.
(c) Only when systems are designed that each takes according to his need.
(d) Only when systems are formed in which each gives according to his ability.

Short Answer Questions

1. At what point does Beauvoir claim an individual has the ability to decide and choose?

2. In the face of emerging violence of man's growing mastery of the world, what does Beauvoir suggest to individuals who seek to navigate it?

3. What does Beauvoir seek to prove regarding man's mastery of the world?

4. How does Beauvoir claim that Marxists consider man's actions to be valid?

5. How does Beauvoir explain what Descartes meant when he said that the freedom of man is infinite, but this power is limited?

(see the answer key)

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