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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 does Beauvoir identify as the irony of the serious man?
(a) He pursues his serious goals but finds them to be insufficient once they are achieved.
(b) He claims that he freely chose his goals, but they are extensions of the structures that formed his childhood.
(c) He defends the seriousness of his goals while disputing the seriousness of the goals of others.
(d) He considers his goals to be serious whereas the free man considers them to be trivial.

2. 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 all ethics eventually lead man to rationalize violations of their ethics.
(c) That although ethics are pursued to define man's existence, they always lead to ambiguity.
(d) That although they seek to lift man to utopia, the eventually lead man to distopia.

3. What does Beauvoir suggest of movements whose means of achieving a goal contradicts the goal?
(a) The action will set off a chain of events that will negate the goal.
(b) The individual who takes such an approach will become a politician.
(c) The whole enterprise sinks into absurdity.
(d) The goal and the individual will be disregarded.

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

5. How does Beauvoir claim an individual can put himself on the plane of the universal and the infinite?
(a) By assuring the means and the ends justify each other.
(b) By considering the ambiguity of their decisions.
(c) By considering a system abstractly and theoretically.
(d) By taking goals that will transcend their lives.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Beauvoir suggest that the ends can justify the means.

2. Why does Beauvoir claim that no project can be considered to be purely contemplative?

3. What does Beauvoir state is the goal at which her freedom aims?

4. When an individual aims at a goal that will be achieved beyond his own death, what does Beauvoir claim the individual should expect from the time given to the goal?

5. How does Beauvoir explain what Descartes meant when he said that the freedom of man is infinite, but this power is limited?

(see the answer key)

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