View a FREE sample

This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 2, Personal Freedom and Others.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Beauvoir claim to be the choice that comes to a young man after a long crisis?
(a) He can escape the stress of his existence or throw himself into the object that defines his goal.
(b) He can accept his ambiguity and move to freedom and ethics, or he can return to the shelters of his childhood.
(c) He can define his life through his choices, or avoid his choices and slip into nothingness.
(d) He either turns back toward the world of his parents and teachers or he adheres to the values which are new but seem to him just as sure.

2. How does Beauvoir claim that Marxists consider man's actions to be valid?
(a) Only if the actions support the revolution of the proletariat.
(b) Only if the actions eliminate private property.
(c) Only if the man has not helped initiate his action by an internal movement or through free will.
(d) Only if the actions are in opposition of the bourgeois.

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

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

5. What does Beauvoir claim defines the "sub-man"?
(a) The man who lives below the potential of his abilities because of choice.
(b) The man who rejects the passion of his human condition and lives according to the world than has been established before him.
(c) The man whose lack of being is defined by his choice.
(d) The man who avoids choice and lives a lack of being.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Beauvoir define as the drama of original choice?

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

3. What comes to the individual at the point he begins to notice the conflicts of the adult world, according to Beauvoir?

4. How does Beauvoir characterize the purpose of the body?

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

(see the answer key)

This section contains 622 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample