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. To what does Beauvoir compare the presence of freedom within the drama of choice?
(a) The historian who chooses threads that take him to the original cause.
(b) The calm before the storm.
(c) The adolescent who sees the world constructed for him as a child is corrupt.
(d) The arbitrariness of the grace distributed by God in Calvinistic Doctrine.

2. What quote from Lenin does Beauvoir use to demonstrate the Marxist revolution has human meaning?
(a) "Our action only has meaning if it brings down the influence of the bourgeois."
(b) "We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat's class struggle."
(c) "The entire purpose of training, educating and teaching the youth of today should be to imbue them with communist ethics."
(d) "I call any action useful to the party moral action; I call it immoral if it is harmful to the party."

3. How does Beauvoir explain that the serious man becomes a dangerous tyrant?
(a) His choice to reject the ambiguity of his freedom combined with the desire to achieve his goal drives him to subject those in his environment to nothing more than instruments of achievement.
(b) He ignores the subjectivity of his choice and sacrifices the freedom of others to achieve his goals.
(c) The consequences of his choices to devote himself to his goal requires that he direct the choices of those around him.
(d) His ultimate goal is always to exert power over other people and usurp their freedom to his purposes.

4. What does Beauvoir claim to be the relationship between the serious and nihilism?
(a) The serious man often rallies to a partial nihilism, denying everything which is not its object.
(b) Seriousness and nihilism focus on goals or the impossibility of reaching them to avoid accepting the freedom of ambiguity.
(c) The serious man and nihilists dispute the purpose of those who do not support their goals.
(d) Seriousness and nihilism both develop a narrow set of ethics based upon a relationship to achievement or lack of the same.

5. How does Beauvoir claim the condition of the world changes from child to adolescence?
(a) The adolescent realizes his decisions have affects.
(b) The world is no longer ready made, but must be made.
(c) The individual begins to realize that matter has significant influence on thought.
(d) When a child begins to realize he cannot create his own existence, he becomes accountable for his thoughts.