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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What irony does Beauvoir suggest contributes to the most optimistic ethics.
(a) That they have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man.
(b) That although ethics are pursued to define man's existence, they always lead to ambiguity.
(c) That although they seek to lift man to utopia, the eventually lead man to distopia.
(d) That all ethics eventually lead man to rationalize violations of their ethics.

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) It is so deeply ambiguous that its true understanding cannot be achieved.
(c) It is incapable of furnishing any principle for making choices.
(d) Its true ambiguity is superficial since it has no moral code.

3. What is the paradox with which Beauvoir closes Chapter One?
(a) 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."
(b) Man as an individual is, "At once alone in himself which makes up the mass of universality."
(c) Man is a being that, "in order to know the existence of achievement he must face the nothingness of failure."
(d) "Man cannot know existence without first knowing his nothingness."

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 rejects the idea of authority in the development of organized masses.
(c) Marxism establishes moral thought through mass rejection of the moral order.
(d) Marxism rejects the moral foundations of law that are rooted in the protection of public property.

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

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Beauvoir define materialist philosophers?

2. What does Beauvoir seek to prove regarding man's mastery of the world?

3. What does Beauvoir report to the the qualities of God that establishes moral standards?

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

5. What does Beauvoir claim can come to people who are filled with the horror of defeat?

(see the answer key)

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