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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 2, Personal Freedom and Others.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How does Beauvoir suggest a child has a state of security?
(a) By virtue of the adults who control his life.
(b) By virtue of his very insignificance.
(c) By virtue of the fantasy world he creates in his mind.
(d) By virtue of his hopes for the future.

2. What is the point at which existentialism is opposed to dialectic materialism according to Beauvoir?
(a) Where revolt, need, hope, rejection, and desire are only the resultants of external forces.
(b) Where subjectivity and objectivity become equally determined by the revolt of the proletariat.
(c) When the proletariat universally works to eliminate its class.
(d) Where intellectual and bourgeois revolutions are considered suspiciously by the proletariat.

3. To what conclusion to Beauvoir arrive regarding Sartre's internal choices that are affected by personal passions?
(a) Since Sartre considers man as driven by internal passions, he brings to question the existence of the physical world and its causes and effects.
(b) Sartre's man eliminates the needs for external moral influence by following passions that eventually lead to personal benefit.
(c) Since passions and their choices are internal, there are no objective standards by which to define their usefulness.
(d) Since man is directed by his eternal passions, the external force of God has no influence in Sartre's existentialism.

4. In what sense does Beauvoir claim that every man is free?
(a) In the sense that he spontaneously casts himself into the world.
(b) In the sense that only consequences affect his choices.
(c) In the sense that he is free to end or continue his existence.
(d) In the sense that he can choose his own ethic.

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

Short Answer Questions

1. What explanation does Beauvoir give to assert that existentialist thought helps to build community.

2. How does Beauvoir define materialist philosophers?

3. How does Beauvoir bring into question the Marxist claim that pure proletariat revolution is generated by the proletariat class?

4. What does Beauvoir indicate can sometimes happen when there is a failure of the serious?

5. What relationship does Beauvoir identify between ethics and facticity?

(see the answer key)

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