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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What relationship does Beauvoir identify between ethics and facticity?
(a) Ethics is the ambiguous manipulation of facticity.
(b) Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.
(c) Ethics cannot exist without facticity upon which to base them.
(d) Ethics are the spawn of facticity.

2. How does Beauvoir define nihilism?
(a) Nihilism is the recognition of the sub-man that he has no purpose outside of what has been defined for him.
(b) Nihilism is the point at which existentialists realize that reality is not framed by their thoughts.
(c) Nihilism is disappointed seriousness which has been turned back upon itself.
(d) Nihilism is the point of nothingness that is felt at the point that the serious man reaches his goals.

3. 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 must at last assume his subjectivity.
(d) The individual faces the daunting challenge of pursuing ethics that have none of the inconsistencies that have plagued societies through history.

4. At what time does Beauvoir suggest that children begin to notice the contradictions, hesitations and weaknesses of adults?
(a) Adolescence.
(b) At the time the become interested in the opposite sex.
(c) The age of accountability.
(d) When they begin to see how their actions affect the world around them.

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

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Beauvoir identify as the irony of the serious man?

2. What prevents a moral question from presenting itself to the child according to Beauvoir?

3. How does Beauvoir explain that the Marxist paradox lends to her theory the scheme of man is ambiguous?

4. What does Descartes credit man's unhappiness to, according to Beauvoir?

5. What does Beauvoir call pursuing the movement toward an end despite the obstacle of certain failure?

(see the answer key)

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