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

Multiple Choice Questions

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

2. Why does Beauvoir claim that some individuals have lives that slip into an infantile world?
(a) Because they are kept in a state of servitude and ignorance and have no means of breaking the ceiling which is over their heads.
(b) Because they never leave the fanciful world they create in their minds.
(c) Because the labor they choose prevents them from using their minds.
(d) Because they discover they are incompetent in the direction they choose for their lives.

3. How does Beauvoir claim that Marxists consider man's actions to be valid?
(a) Only if the man has not helped initiate his action by an internal movement or through free will.
(b) Only if the actions support the revolution of the proletariat.
(c) Only if the actions are in opposition of the bourgeois.
(d) Only if the actions eliminate private property.

4. How does the "sub-man" submerge his freedom, according to Beauvoir?
(a) He refuses subjectivity in favor of predictability.
(b) He ignores the ambiguity of his existence.
(c) He accepts the ethics and expectations of society.
(d) He avoids actions that have consequences.

5. What is the focus of the adventurer?
(a) To enter the future by leaving memorable acts for the past.
(b) To live in defiance of oppression for ambiguous goals.
(c) To define life by attempting to will himself free.
(d) To satisfy a desire for existence in a present, subjective, abstract moment.

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

7. What explanation does Beauvoir give to assert that existentialist thought helps to build community.
(a) Beauvoir asserts, "Existentialists, with their dogmatic adherence to solipsism, help to rally a wide range of theorists to disprove their irrationality."
(b) Beauvoir asserts, "Despite their disparate views, existentialists easily welcome any detractor because they only see them as creations of their own minds."
(c) Beauvoir asserts, "Existentialists are more often inviting of debate since they do not consider any idea as wrong because they accept no idea as right."
(d) Beauvoir asserts, "...existentialism,...(is) the plurality of concrete particular men projecting themselves toward their ends on the basis of situations whose particularity is as radical and irreducible as subjectivity.

8. What comes to the individual at the point he begins to notice the conflicts of the adult world, according to Beauvoir?
(a) The individual has the choice of holding to existentialist myths or accepting his ambiguity.
(b) The individual faces the daunting challenge of pursuing ethics that have none of the inconsistencies that have plagued societies through history.
(c) The individual must at last assume his subjectivity.
(d) The individual can pursue freedom or seriousness.

9. How does Beauvoir define materialist philosophers?
(a) Those who see "no value in thought".
(b) Those who "conceive all matter as eternal".
(c) Those who "see no life after this one".
(d) Those who have "striven to reduce mind to matter".

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

11. 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 vessel that evaluates the harm or benefit of consequences.
(d) It becomes the barometer that marks the move from child to adolescent to mature adult.

12. How does Beauvoir compare women to slaves?
(a) By pointing out that women are subject to the laws, gods, customs, and truths created by males.
(b) By pointing out that many women choose to be ignorant of the condition of the world.
(c) By pointing out that women create an existence in their minds that escapes the reality of the world around them.
(d) By pointing out that women base their success on the contentment of their families.

13. Beauvoir claims that critics of existentialism claim that it is solipsistic. What is solipsism?
(a) The theory that life is nothing more than a creation in the mind of God.
(b) The theory that only the physical life exists and matter is eternal.
(c) The theory that only the self (mind) exists or can be proven to exist.
(d) The theory that life is replicated on many planets in many worlds.

14. How does Beauvoir explain that a child, himself, is not serious?
(a) A child is not aware that his fate is the grave.
(b) A child's thoughts are often fanciful and unrealistic.
(c) A child is not affected by the knowledge of things that have been established before him.
(d) 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.

15. How does Beauvoir characterize the fate of the "sub-man"?
(a) He does not recognize his facticity, therefore he does not experience the triumph of freedom through the development of his ethics.
(b) He finds nothing to appreciate and in turn no one appreciates him.
(c) He makes his way across a world deprived of meaning toward a death which merely confirm his long negation of himself.
(d) His ethics and facticity have no consequences, therefore they are nonexistent.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Beauvoir indicate can sometimes happen when there is a failure of the serious?

2. What does Beauvoir claim can come to people who are filled with the horror of defeat?

3. What does Beauvoir seek to prove regarding man's mastery of the world?

4. What does Beauvoir claim comes of the man who does not use his the necessary instruments to escape the lie of his serious life that prevents his freedom?

5. What does Beauvoir claim to be the affect of rejecting any extrinsic justification for internal choices?

(see the answer keys)

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