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

2. How does Beauvoir explain what Descartes meant when he said that the freedom of man is infinite, but this power is limited?
(a) The individual man has the power to follow his desires until his pursuit is obstructed by a more power man.
(b) That man is free to believe all things, but achieving them is subject to the physical universe.
(c) That the will is defined only by raising obstacles and by the contingency of certain obstacles that let themselves be conquered and others that do not.
(d) That man's mind has no limits in thought, but his physical body does not have the ability to follow the thoughts.

3. What does Beauvoir seek to prove regarding man's mastery of the world?
(a) That the more widespread men attain mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by it.
(b) Man's mastery of the world is futile, because nature is constantly changing beyond man's ability to contain it.
(c) With each gain to control his surroundings, man feels himself more insignificant within the immense collectivity on the earth.
(d) Man's journey to master the world is a quest to meet God.

4. Although Beauvoir reports that existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity, what does she claim to be existentialism's fundamental flaw?
(a) Its true ambiguity is superficial since it has no moral code.
(b) It is incapable of furnishing any principle for making choices.
(c) It is so deeply ambiguous that its true understanding cannot be achieved.
(d) Existentialism is essentially taken by individuals seeking to pursue what is normally antisocial and contributes to the violence of mastery of nature.

5. How does Beauvoir show how her example of moving through obstacles prove her arguments?
(a) She asserted that Van Gogh, despite being institutionalized, integrated his his past as a painter and continued to communicate through his talent.
(b) She explained that Adalai Stevenson believed his intellectualism would over come Dwight Eisenhower's popular reputation in two presidential elections.
(c) She explained that Sisyphus was condemned to rolling the boulder up the mountain despite his the fact that it would roll back down once he got it to the top.
(d) She pointed out that Hitler had desires to rule the world in spite of the fact that he did not have the ability to take his navy outside of the North Sea.

Short Answer Questions

1. What role does time play what Beauvoir identifies as the ability to will oneself free?

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

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

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

5. 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?

(see the answer key)

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