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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Beauvoir claim to be the choice that comes to a young man after a long crisis?
(a) He can accept his ambiguity and move to freedom and ethics, or he can return to the shelters of his childhood.
(b) He either turns back toward the world of his parents and teachers or he adheres to the values which are new but seem to him just as sure.
(c) He can define his life through his choices, or avoid his choices and slip into nothingness.
(d) He can escape the stress of his existence or throw himself into the object that defines his goal.

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

3. 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?
(a) He is no longer a man, but a father, a boss, a member of the Christian Church or the Communist party.
(b) He is condemned to living a life in which all his ethics, morality, and decisions are made for him.
(c) He becomes a "sub-man" who has no more purpose in existing than pebbles or trees.
(d) He slips back into the defined existence of a child.

4. To what does Beauvoir compare the presence of freedom within the drama of choice?
(a) The arbitrariness of the grace distributed by God in Calvinistic Doctrine.
(b) The calm before the storm.
(c) The adolescent who sees the world constructed for him as a child is corrupt.
(d) The historian who chooses threads that take him to the original cause.

5. How does Beauvoir claim that Marxists consider man's actions to be valid?
(a) Only if the actions are in opposition of the bourgeois.
(b) Only if the man has not helped initiate his action by an internal movement or through free will.
(c) Only if the actions support the revolution of the proletariat.
(d) Only if the actions eliminate private property.

6. How does human spontaneity give purpose to a human life, according to Beauvoir?
(a) By spontaneity always projecting itself toward something.
(b) By spontaneous acts require conscious evaluation to determine their usefulness.
(c) By spontaneous acts have affects in a physical world.
(d) By the fact the spontaneous act of an individual draws a response from others.

7. 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 the physical world on the development of a moral code.
(c) The role of an external moral code in extinguishing passions.
(d) The role of a dualistic spiritual existence in directing passion.

8. Although Beauvoir reports that existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity, what does she claim to be existentialism's fundamental flaw?
(a) It is so deeply ambiguous that its true understanding cannot be achieved.
(b) Existentialism is essentially taken by individuals seeking to pursue what is normally antisocial and contributes to the violence of mastery of nature.
(c) It is incapable of furnishing any principle for making choices.
(d) Its true ambiguity is superficial since it has no moral code.

9. How does Beauvoir claim that the child develops the conviction of good and evil?
(a) Through joy and disappointment.
(b) Through pain and healing.
(c) Through observation and learning.
(d) Through punishments, prizes, words of praise or blame.

10. How does Beauvoir define nihilism?
(a) Nihilism is disappointed seriousness which has been turned back upon itself.
(b) Nihilism is the recognition of the sub-man that he has no purpose outside of what has been defined for him.
(c) Nihilism is the point of nothingness that is felt at the point that the serious man reaches his goals.
(d) Nihilism is the point at which existentialists realize that reality is not framed by their thoughts.

11. How does Beauvoir characterize the fate of the "sub-man"?
(a) He makes his way across a world deprived of meaning toward a death which merely confirm his long negation of himself.
(b) He finds nothing to appreciate and in turn no one appreciates him.
(c) His ethics and facticity have no consequences, therefore they are nonexistent.
(d) He does not recognize his facticity, therefore he does not experience the triumph of freedom through the development of his ethics.

12. According to Beauvoir, how is freedom present within the drama of choice?
(a) Within the analysis that leads to a decision.
(b) Before the realization that a choice must be made.
(c) In the moment before consequences are evident.
(d) Only in the form of contingency.

13. What is a principle that Beauvoir states that an ethics of ambiguity will refuse to deny a priori?
(a) That separate existants can be bound to each other, such as individual freedoms can forge laws valid for all.
(b) That the most important element of "ethics of ambiguity" is to disallow them from defining the conduct of those outside their understanding.
(c) That, by definition, "ethics of ambiguity" must remained undefined.
(d) That "ethics of ambiguity" are as solipsistic as is existentialism.

14. What explanation does Beauvoir give to assert that existentialist thought helps to build community.
(a) Beauvoir asserts, "Existentialists are more often inviting of debate since they do not consider any idea as wrong because they accept no idea as right."
(b) Beauvoir asserts, "Existentialists, with their dogmatic adherence to solipsism, help to rally a wide range of theorists to disprove their irrationality."
(c) Beauvoir asserts, "Despite their disparate views, existentialists easily welcome any detractor because they only see them as creations of their own minds."
(d) Beauvoir asserts, "...existentialism,...(is) the plurality of concrete particular men projecting themselves toward their ends on the basis of situations whose particularity is as radical and irreducible as subjectivity.

15. How does Beauvoir consider stubbornness in the face of an obstacle that is impossible to overcome?
(a) As the seed of innocent hope.
(b) As the beginning of innovation.
(c) As that trial that brings experience.
(d) As stupidity.

Short Answer Questions

1. What comes to the individual at the point he begins to notice the conflicts of the adult world, according to Beauvoir?

2. What role does time play what Beauvoir identifies as the ability to will oneself free?

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

4. How does Beauvoir compare southern slaves to children?

5. What does Beauvoir claim matters to the serious man?

(see the answer keys)

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