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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. During their stage of freedom, how does Beauvoir claim that a child sees adults?
(a) As divinities.
(b) As physically threatening.
(c) As fanciful projections of their uninhibited minds.
(d) As benevolent dictators that provide their needs.

2. How does Beauvoir explain that a child, himself, is not serious?
(a) A child's thoughts are often fanciful and unrealistic.
(b) A child is allowed to play and expend his existence freely to passionately pursue and joyfully attain goals which he has set up for himself.
(c) A child is not aware that his fate is the grave.
(d) A child is not affected by the knowledge of things that have been established before him.

3. What does Beauvoir identify as the certain truth contained in the nihilist attitude?
(a) The nihilist attitude realizes the unreliability of man.
(b) The nihilist attitude is prepared for obstacles that always come from a complex world.
(c) In the nihilist attitude one experiences the ambiguity of the human condition.
(d) The nihilist attitude understands the finite nature of life.

4. To what conclusion to Beauvoir arrive regarding Sartre's internal choices that are affected by personal passions?
(a) Since man is directed by his eternal passions, the external force of God has no influence in Sartre's existentialism.
(b) Since passions and their choices are internal, there are no objective standards by which to define their usefulness.
(c) Since Sartre considers man as driven by internal passions, he brings to question the existence of the physical world and its causes and effects.
(d) Sartre's man eliminates the needs for external moral influence by following passions that eventually lead to personal benefit.

5. What does Beauvoir claim to be necessary to the desire for the slave to become conscious of his servitude?
(a) For the tyrant to leave the Aesthetic Attitude and accept the oppression he is bringing to others.
(b) For the individual to accept oppression for the sake of demonstrating how the individual can will their freedom.
(c) For the individual to break through the denial of the slave with a revolt against the tyrant.
(d) For the individual who wants to make the slave of his position to avoid becoming a tyrant.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Beauvoir mean when she refers to "The Antinomies of Action"?

2. For whom do Beauvoir and Marx agree that the cause of freedom is most urgent?

3. By quoting Dostoyevsky ("If God does not exist, then everything is permitted"), what examination does Beauvoir make?

4. How will an oppressor use history to justify his oppression, according to Beauvoir?

5. How does the child's life begin actually become serious according to Beauvoir?

(see the answer key)

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