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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How does Beauvoir characterize the purpose of the body?
(a) It expresses our relationship to the world.
(b) It enjoys the pleasures of freedom before consequences are manifest.
(c) It becomes the barometer that marks the move from child to adolescent to mature adult.
(d) It becomes the vessel that evaluates the harm or benefit of consequences.

2. What does Beauvoir claim to be the affect of rejecting any extrinsic justification for internal choices?
(a) Such rejection also eliminates any standard by which choices are determined to be useful.
(b) Such rejection also removes the motivations upon passions are fueled.
(c) Such rejection would also reject the original pessimism which she seeks to address with her work.
(d) Such rejection would lead to the erosion of any social order that makes choice useful.

3. What type of man does Beauvoir identify as being nihilistic?
(a) The point at which the serious man realizes the pursuit of his goals have been made at the expense of his freedom.
(b) The man who sees the futility of his goals and realizes he has missed the benefits of his ambiguity.
(c) When a man who faces failure becomes conscious of being unable to be anything and decides to be nothing.
(d) The man who disputes the seriousness of another man's goals to the point that his goals are regarded as generally useless as a consequence.

4. According to Beauvoir, how is freedom present within the drama of choice?
(a) Only in the form of contingency.
(b) In the moment before consequences are evident.
(c) Within the analysis that leads to a decision.
(d) Before the realization that a choice must be made.

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

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

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

8. How does Beauvoir accuse Marxists of accepting moral superiority?
(a) By being suspicious of any bourgeois revolution.
(b) When Marxists find fault with their adversaries and charge them with cowardice, lying, selfishness, and venality.
(c) By considering any movement in which a Marxist is involved to be part of the revolution of the proletariat.
(d) By morally condemning any member of the proletariat who does not participate in revolution.

9. 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) The goal of freedom is pursued and confirmed in time.
(c) Time is required for the individual to understand that he is free.
(d) Time allows the accumulation of spontaneous acts to define their direction.

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

11. What idea regarding ethics does Beauvoir attribute to Hegel?
(a) "Ethics is self-contained because reality is self-contained."
(b) "There is an ethics only if there is a problem to solve."
(c) "Ethics is irrelevant because they only affect manipulation of a material universe."
(d) "Ethics are the creation of minds that fear facing problems."

12. In what way does Beauvoir consider nihilistic thinking to be right?
(a) In understanding the obstacles that come from a complex world.
(b) In thinking that the world possesses no justification and that he himself is nothing.
(c) In realizing that peace is punctuated by oppression and revolution.
(d) In understanding the future will be marked by violence.

13. How does Beauvoir explain that a child, himself, is not serious?
(a) 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.
(b) A child's thoughts are often fanciful and unrealistic.
(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.

14. How does human spontaneity give purpose to a human life, according to Beauvoir?
(a) By spontaneous acts have affects in a physical world.
(b) By spontaneous acts require conscious evaluation to determine their usefulness.
(c) By the fact the spontaneous act of an individual draws a response from others.
(d) By spontaneity always projecting itself toward something.

15. 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) The serious man rejects all independent thought for the sake of achieving his goal.
(c) The serious man is defined by his goal not by his choices or acts.
(d) Rather than finding freedom in choosing goals, the serious man chooses goals to avoid his freedom.

Short Answer Questions

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

2. To what does Beauvoir compare the "sub-man" in his relationship to ethics and facticity?

3. How does Beauvoir identify dualism?

4. What is a principle that Beauvoir states that an ethics of ambiguity will refuse to deny a priori?

5. To what conclusion to Beauvoir arrive regarding Sartre's internal choices that are affected by personal passions?

(see the answer keys)

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