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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 3, The Positive Aspect of Ambiguity, Sections 1-3, The Aesthetic Attitude, Freedom and Liberation, The Antinomies of Action.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What irony does Beauvoir suggest contributes to the most optimistic ethics.
(a) That they have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man.
(b) That although they seek to lift man to utopia, the eventually lead man to distopia.
(c) That all ethics eventually lead man to rationalize violations of their ethics.
(d) That although ethics are pursued to define man's existence, they always lead to ambiguity.

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

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

4. What is the illustration Beauvoir uses to prove her assertion of stubbornness in the face of impossibility?
(a) Beating her fist upon a stone.
(b) The sapling that grows through a sidewalk.
(c) The development of the airplane.
(d) The deaths that preceded the first successful climb of Mt. Everest.

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

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Beauvoir identify as the paradox of Marxist thought?

2. How does Beauvoir identify dualism?

3. Upon what does Beauvoir claim that a child's freedom is based?

4. Although Beauvoir reports that existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity, what does she claim to be existentialism's fundamental flaw?

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

(see the answer key)

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