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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 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."

2. How does Beauvoir bring into question the Marxist claim that pure proletariat revolution is generated by the proletariat class?
(a) The Proletariat can be influenced by materialistic gain.
(b) That even a Marxist needs to make a personal decision to join one party or another.
(c) Too often members of the proletariat seek to become bourgeois.
(d) A proletariat revolution is too often halted by various conditions in various locations.

3. How does Beauvoir introduce the role of God in the discussion of ethics?
(a) By considering the endless pursuit of pure ethics and the failure to achieve such places the power of judgement in the hands of God.
(b) By pointing out that Sartre's view of existentialism ends with man attempting to make himself God.
(c) By pointing out that all ethics end up being an effort to define God.
(d) By suggesting the wide views of the nature of God actually makes God ambiguous.

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

5. Beauvoir claims that critics of existentialism claim that it is solipsistic. What is solipsism?
(a) The theory that life is nothing more than a creation in the mind of God.
(b) The theory that life is replicated on many planets in many worlds.
(c) The theory that only the self (mind) exists or can be proven to exist.
(d) The theory that only the physical life exists and matter is eternal.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does human spontaneity give purpose to a human life, according to Beauvoir?

2. How does Beauvoir suggest a past accomplishment can be made relevant in the present?

3. What does Beauvoir suggest becomes the intellectual responsibility of existentialists who reject God?

4. At what point does Beauvoir claim an individual has the ability to decide and choose?

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

(see the answer key)

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