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 is the point at which existentialism is opposed to dialectic materialism according to Beauvoir?
(a) Where intellectual and bourgeois revolutions are considered suspiciously by the proletariat.
(b) Where subjectivity and objectivity become equally determined by the revolt of the proletariat.
(c) Where revolt, need, hope, rejection, and desire are only the resultants of external forces.
(d) When the proletariat universally works to eliminate its class.

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

3. 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 accept the insignificance of the individual as a means of embracing individual ambiguity.
(b) To seek to understand God's role in the growing environment of violence.
(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.

4. According to Beauvoir, what is the goal of dualist teachings to their disciples?
(a) To see the physical life as ambiguous.
(b) To eliminate ambiguity from the after life.
(c) To escape ambiguity.
(d) To eliminate ambiguity from extraterrestrial life.

5. How does Beauvoir explain how goals supplant freedom in the life of the serious man?
(a) Goals become the means of defining the existence of the serious man at the cost of freedom and individually defining his ethics.
(b) Rather than finding freedom in choosing goals, the serious man chooses goals to avoid his freedom.
(c) The serious man rejects all independent thought for the sake of achieving his goal.
(d) The serious man is defined by his goal not by his choices or acts.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Beauvoir claim that the child develops the conviction of good and evil?

2. What does Beauvoir claim defines the "sub-man"?

3. What does Beauvoir identify as the certain truth contained in the nihilist attitude?

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

5. What is the focus of the adventurer?

(see the answer key)

This section contains 552 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample