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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 4-5, The Present and the Future, Ambiguity and Conclusion.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. 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 is a being that, "in order to know the existence of achievement he must face the nothingness of failure."
(d) Man as an individual is, "At once alone in himself which makes up the mass of universality."

2. What idea regarding ethics does Beauvoir attribute to Hegel?
(a) "Ethics is self-contained because reality is self-contained."
(b) "Ethics is irrelevant because they only affect manipulation of a material universe."
(c) "Ethics are the creation of minds that fear facing problems."
(d) "There is an ethics only if there is a problem to solve."

3. How does Beauvoir suggest that a child console himself when confronted with personal imperfection?
(a) By denying the flaw and moving to his next goal.
(b) By holding to ignorance so as not to have to explain his predicament.
(c) By blaming his problem on another child.
(d) By pinning his hopes on the future.

4. Why does Beauvoir claim that some individuals have lives that slip into an infantile world?
(a) Because they discover they are incompetent in the direction they choose for their lives.
(b) Because they never leave the fanciful world they create in their minds.
(c) Because the labor they choose prevents them from using their minds.
(d) Because they are kept in a state of servitude and ignorance and have no means of breaking the ceiling which is over their heads.

5. How does Beauvoir compare southern slaves to children?
(a) By comparing the ignorance of their condition to the ignorance of children to the realities of the world.
(b) By comparing their faith in a heavenly afterlife to the fantasy world that children create in their minds.
(c) By comparing their obedience to the slave owner to that of children to adults in their lives.
(d) By comparing hopes for freedom to the a child's hope for the future.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is a principle that Beauvoir states that an ethics of ambiguity will refuse to deny a priori?

2. How will an oppressor use history to justify his oppression, according to Beauvoir?

3. How does Beauvoir suggest that Christian charity, Epicurean cult of friendship, and Kantian moralism share the same point of views?

4. What does Beauvoir claim comes of the man who does not use his the necessary instruments to escape the lie of his serious life that prevents his freedom?

5. How does the "sub-man" submerge his freedom, according to Beauvoir?

(see the answer key)

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