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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How does Beauvoir characterize the purpose of the body?
(a) It becomes the vessel that evaluates the harm or benefit of consequences.
(b) It expresses our relationship to the world.
(c) It becomes the barometer that marks the move from child to adolescent to mature adult.
(d) It enjoys the pleasures of freedom before consequences are manifest.

2. What prevents a moral question from presenting itself to the child according to Beauvoir?
(a) Ignorance of consequences.
(b) A lack of perspective to see himself in the past or seeing himself in the future.
(c) The misunderstanding of spontaneity and affects.
(d) Ignorance of the physical world.

3. How does Beauvoir define materialist philosophers?
(a) Those who have "striven to reduce mind to matter".
(b) Those who "conceive all matter as eternal".
(c) Those who "see no life after this one".
(d) Those who see "no value in thought".

4. What does Beauvoir claim to protect the child from the risk of existence?
(a) His budding existentialist belief that only thoughts matter.
(b) His inability to comprehend the consequences of decisions.
(c) His obedience to adults.
(d) The ceiling which human generations have built over his head.

5. What does Beauvoir report comes to the individual at the time the world changes in his perspective?
(a) He can begin to control the consequences of his acts.
(b) The world is no longer ready made.
(c) He has the moment of moral choice.
(d) He faces the choice of repeating past mistakes or breaking from them.

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

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

8. How does Beauvoir compare southern slaves to children?
(a) By comparing their faith in a heavenly afterlife to the fantasy world that children create in their minds.
(b) By comparing the ignorance of their condition to the ignorance of children to the realities of the world.
(c) By comparing hopes for freedom to the a child's hope for the future.
(d) By comparing their obedience to the slave owner to that of children to adults in their lives.

9. What comes to the individual at the point he begins to notice the conflicts of the adult world, according to Beauvoir?
(a) The individual has the choice of holding to existentialist myths or accepting his ambiguity.
(b) The individual can pursue freedom or seriousness.
(c) The individual faces the daunting challenge of pursuing ethics that have none of the inconsistencies that have plagued societies through history.
(d) The individual must at last assume his subjectivity.

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

11. 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) "Our action only has meaning if it brings down the influence of the bourgeois."
(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."

12. What does Beauvoir report to be the child's situation?
(a) His ambiguity is compounded by his ignorance of right and wrong.
(b) He is subject to accept all things based upon what others tell him.
(c) He is cast into a universe which he has not helped to establish and appears as an absolute to which he can only submit.
(d) He faces the reality that his freedom is continually reduced by his growing knowledge.

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

14. What does Beauvoir identify as the irony of the serious man?
(a) He considers his goals to be serious whereas the free man considers them to be trivial.
(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 pursues his serious goals but finds them to be insufficient once they are achieved.

15. What does Beauvoir claim comes of an accomplished act that is left behind by an individual?
(a) It becomes nothing more than a fact.
(b) The act remains as an experience that lends to the development of the will.
(c) The affects of the act continue, but the act becomes forgotten.
(d) It has a diminished affect as time and spontaneous acts have different consequences.

Short Answer Questions

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

2. What is the point at which existentialism is opposed to dialectic materialism according to Beauvoir?

3. How does Beauvoir claim the condition of the world changes from child to adolescence?

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

5. What idea regarding ethics does Beauvoir attribute to Hegel?

(see the answer keys)

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