View a FREE sample

This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 1, Ambiguity and Freedom.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Beauvoir seek to prove regarding man's mastery of the world?
(a) Man's journey to master the world is a quest to meet God.
(b) Man's mastery of the world is futile, because nature is constantly changing beyond man's ability to contain it.
(c) That the more widespread men attain mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by it.
(d) With each gain to control his surroundings, man feels himself more insignificant within the immense collectivity on the earth.

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

3. What does Beauvoir state is the goal at which her freedom aims?
(a) "Understanding the difference between delusion, denial, and stone pounding to affirm true existence."
(b) "Rejecting the verdicts of doubters and seeing the possibility of achieving ends through obstacles."
(c) "...(C)onquering existence across the always inadequate density of being."
(d) "Seeing the doors of defeat before initiating and act."

4. How does Beauvoir compare Marxism to existentialism?
(a) Marxism rejects the idea of inhuman objectivity and locates itself in the tradition of Kant and Hegel.
(b) Marxism establishes moral thought through mass rejection of the moral order.
(c) Marxism rejects the idea of authority in the development of organized masses.
(d) Marxism rejects the moral foundations of law that are rooted in the protection of public property.

5. How does Beauvoir show how her example of moving through obstacles prove her arguments?
(a) She pointed out that Hitler had desires to rule the world in spite of the fact that he did not have the ability to take his navy outside of the North Sea.
(b) She explained that Adalai Stevenson believed his intellectualism would over come Dwight Eisenhower's popular reputation in two presidential elections.
(c) She asserted that Van Gogh, despite being institutionalized, integrated his his past as a painter and continued to communicate through his talent.
(d) She explained that Sisyphus was condemned to rolling the boulder up the mountain despite his the fact that it would roll back down once he got it to the top.

Short Answer Questions

1. To what conclusion to Beauvoir arrive regarding Sartre's internal choices that are affected by personal passions?

2. How does Beauvoir introduce the role of God in the discussion of ethics?

3. How does Beauvoir identify dualism?

4. What does Beauvoir require for an individual to genuinely desire an end in the present?

5. What does Beauvoir claim comes, "...between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet,..."?

(see the answer key)

This section contains 746 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample