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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 3, The Positive Aspect of Ambiguity, Sections 1-3, The Aesthetic Attitude, Freedom and Liberation, The Antinomies of Action.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. By quoting Dostoyevsky ("If God does not exist, then everything is permitted"), what examination does Beauvoir make?
(a) The role of the existence of God in defining the existence of man and the world.
(b) The role of an external moral code in extinguishing passions.
(c) The role of a dualistic spiritual existence in directing passion.
(d) The role of the physical world on the development of a moral code.

2. What does Beauvoir note to be the objection of oppressors who are facing overthrow for the cause of freedom?
(a) Overthrowing oppressors will bring neophytes to incompetently administer the principles of law and justice.
(b) Overthrowing the order of oppressors threatens to subject all to barbarism.
(c) By overthrowing their oppression, the freedom of oppressors is being deprived.
(d) Those who overthrow an oppressor are only seeking the power to oppress.

3. What does Beauvoir indicate can sometimes happen when there is a failure of the serious?
(a) Sometimes the serious man will revert to his childhood and depend on others for his purpose.
(b) The serious man will have to rely on what training he had as a child to deal with failure.
(c) It can bring about a radical disorder.
(d) Sometimes the serious man will recognize his ambiguity and act freely to establish an ethic to help him through his failure.

4. What does Beauvoir suggest becomes the intellectual responsibility of existentialists who reject God?
(a) He has the responsibility of defining how works for self-benefit are also beneficial to his environs.
(b) He bears the responsibility to show his works for self-benefit do not affect others in his environs.
(c) He bears the responsibility to prove the lives of others have not affects on himself, starting with the union of his parents that brought his existence.
(d) He bears responsibility for a world which is not the work of strange power.

5. How does Beauvoir establish the relationship between things and man in human action?
(a) Things are the result of the actions of man and help man transcend time and space.
(b) Things validate the actions of man through being the products of projects of man.
(c) Things remain through history after the actions of man bring them to reality.
(d) This sustain the actions of man by presenting themselves as obstacles.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Beauvoir claim a child can do due to his state of security?

2. What does Beauvoir mean when she refers to "The Antinomies of Action"?

3. What prevents a moral question from presenting itself to the child according to Beauvoir?

4. Beauvoir claims that critics of existentialism claim that it is solipsistic. What is solipsism?

5. How does Beauvoir explain that an individual might be responsible for what they accept, but not guilty for acting upon it?

(see the answer key)

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