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

Multiple Choice Questions

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

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

3. 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 that trial that brings experience.
(c) As stupidity.
(d) As the beginning of innovation.

4. What does Beauvoir suggest becomes the intellectual responsibility of existentialists who reject God?
(a) 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.
(b) He bears the responsibility to show his works for self-benefit do not affect others in his environs.
(c) He bears responsibility for a world which is not the work of strange power.
(d) He has the responsibility of defining how works for self-benefit are also beneficial to his environs.

5. What does Beauvoir identify as the spirit of seriousness?
(a) Facing the reality that the fate of all is the grave.
(b) Leaving the fallacy of materialists that only matter matters.
(c) Leaving the fallacy of existentialism that only thought matters.
(d) To consider values as ready-made things.

6. How does Beauvoir define the relationship of the "sub-man" to ethics and facticity?
(a) The "sub-man" rejects ethics and feels only the facticity of his existence.
(b) The "sub-man" considers ethics and facticity as interchangeable.
(c) The "sub-man" rejects the ambiguity of ethics as influences over his facticity.
(d) The "sub-man" accepts ethics as the facticity of his existence as unchangeable.

7. 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 becomes a "sub-man" who has no more purpose in existing than pebbles or trees.
(c) He slips back into the defined existence of a child.
(d) He is condemned to living a life in which all his ethics, morality, and decisions are made for him.

8. 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 all ethics eventually lead man to rationalize violations of their ethics.
(c) That they have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man.
(d) That although they seek to lift man to utopia, the eventually lead man to distopia.

9. What quote from Lenin does Beauvoir use to demonstrate the Marxist revolution has human meaning?
(a) "Our action only has meaning if it brings down the influence of the bourgeois."
(b) "We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat's class struggle."
(c) "I call any action useful to the party moral action; I call it immoral if it is harmful to the party."
(d) "The entire purpose of training, educating and teaching the youth of today should be to imbue them with communist ethics."

10. What does Beauvoir claim to be the affect of rejecting any extrinsic justification for internal choices?
(a) Such rejection also removes the motivations upon passions are fueled.
(b) Such rejection also eliminates any standard by which choices are determined to be useful.
(c) Such rejection would lead to the erosion of any social order that makes choice useful.
(d) Such rejection would also reject the original pessimism which she seeks to address with her work.

11. What role does time play what Beauvoir identifies as the ability to will oneself free?
(a) The goal of freedom is pursued and confirmed in time.
(b) Time allows the accumulation of spontaneous acts to define their direction.
(c) Time is required for the individual to understand that he is free.
(d) The individual uses time to manipulate the physical world to exercise his freedom.

12. At what point does Beauvoir claim an individual has the ability to decide and choose?
(a) When the usefulness of spontaneous acts are identifiable by the individual.
(b) When he responds to the consequences of spontaneous acts.
(c) When he can see and manipulate the affects of spontaneous acts on the physical world.
(d) When the moments of his life begin to be organized into behavior.

13. How does Beauvoir explain how the passionate man different from the adventurer man?
(a) The passionate man fails to fulfill his subjectivity rather than the content of the subjectivity.
(b) The passionate man has a focus guiding his adventures.
(c) The passionate man attaches his adventure to unmovable ethics.
(d) The passionate man acts from internal desires.

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

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

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Descartes credit man's unhappiness to, according to Beauvoir?

2. How does Beauvoir claim that a spontaneous action, or flight, can be converted into will?

3. What is the focus of the adventurer?

4. In what way does Beauvoir suggest Marxists practice free will?

5. How does Beauvoir explain that a child, himself, is not serious?

(see the answer keys)

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