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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 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) "Seeing the doors of defeat before initiating and act."
(c) "...(C)onquering existence across the always inadequate density of being."
(d) "Rejecting the verdicts of doubters and seeing the possibility of achieving ends through obstacles."

2. In the face of emerging violence of man's growing mastery of the world, what does Beauvoir suggest to individuals who seek to navigate it?
(a) To seek to understand God's role in the growing environment of violence.
(b) To accept the insignificance of the individual as a means of embracing individual ambiguity.
(c) To assume and know the condition of our fundamental ambiguity.
(d) To discontinue to attempt to keep up with the changes going on in the world.

3. 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) Its true ambiguity is superficial since it has no moral code.
(d) It is incapable of furnishing any principle for making choices.

4. What role does time play what Beauvoir identifies as the ability to will oneself free?
(a) The goal of freedom is pursued and confirmed in time.
(b) The individual uses time to manipulate the physical world to exercise his freedom.
(c) Time is required for the individual to understand that he is free.
(d) Time allows the accumulation of spontaneous acts to define their direction.

5. How does Beauvoir explain that the Marxist paradox lends to her theory the scheme of man is ambiguous?
(a) She points out that , "He wants to be, and to the extent that the coincides with this wish, he fails."
(b) She suggests that, although, "Marxists deride traditional moral codes that forbid theft and adultery as being 'bourgeois', she points out that strict adherence to Marxist dogma is a moral imperative for revolution."
(c) She shows that, "Morality is based on denial, while work and labor is based upon acquisition."
(d) She agrees that, "One even the most devoted proletariat has what he needs, he begins feeding his desires."

Short Answer Questions

1. What is a principle that Beauvoir states that an ethics of ambiguity will refuse to deny a priori?

2. How does Beauvoir show how her example of moving through obstacles prove her arguments?

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

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

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

(see the answer key)

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