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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Beauvoir claim comes, "...between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet,..."?
(a) The crossroads of reality.
(b) This moment when (the individual) exists.
(c) The point at which time ceases to move.
(d) The ever changing moment of the present.

2. 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?
(a) He slips back into the defined existence of a child.
(b) He becomes a "sub-man" who has no more purpose in existing than pebbles or trees.
(c) He is condemned to living a life in which all his ethics, morality, and decisions are made for him.
(d) He is no longer a man, but a father, a boss, a member of the Christian Church or the Communist party.

3. What does Beauvoir indicate can sometimes happen when there is a failure of the serious?
(a) Sometimes the serious man will recognize his ambiguity and act freely to establish an ethic to help him through his failure.
(b) Sometimes the serious man will revert to his childhood and depend on others for his purpose.
(c) The serious man will have to rely on what training he had as a child to deal with failure.
(d) It can bring about a radical disorder.

4. What does Beauvoir identify as the irony of the serious man?
(a) He considers his goals to be serious whereas the free man considers them to be trivial.
(b) He defends the seriousness of his goals while disputing the seriousness of the goals of others.
(c) He pursues his serious goals but finds them to be insufficient once they are achieved.
(d) He claims that he freely chose his goals, but they are extensions of the structures that formed his childhood.

5. What prevents a moral question from presenting itself to the child according to Beauvoir?
(a) Ignorance of consequences.
(b) Ignorance of the physical world.
(c) A lack of perspective to see himself in the past or seeing himself in the future.
(d) The misunderstanding of spontaneity and affects.

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

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

8. What does Beauvoir suggest becomes the intellectual responsibility of existentialists who reject God?
(a) He bears the responsibility to prove the lives of others have not affects on himself, starting with the union of his parents that brought his existence.
(b) He bears the responsibility to show his works for self-benefit do not affect others in his environs.
(c) He has the responsibility of defining how works for self-benefit are also beneficial to his environs.
(d) He bears responsibility for a world which is not the work of strange power.

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

10. 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 are in opposition of the bourgeois.
(c) Only if the actions support the revolution of the proletariat.
(d) Only if the actions eliminate private property.

11. What claim of existentialists does Beauvoir offer in defense of detractors to existentialism?
(a) Bouvoir claims that existentialists help to accentuate the strengths of other theories.
(b) Bouvoir claims that existentialists offer their detractors important challenges to prove their theories.
(c) Bouvoir claims that existentialists believe that the world is willed by man, insofar as his will expresses his genuine reality.
(d) Bouvoir claims that existentialists give focus to the importance of matter in reality.

12. What does Beauvoir identify as the paradox of Marxist thought?
(a) "The point at which the proletariat overthrows the bourgeois, they immediately attempt to become bourgeois."
(b) "From the moment a man recognizes himself as free, he is prohibited from wishing for anything."
(c) "Marxist deny accepting morality while condemning all movements that do not accept their moral view."
(d) "Marxist deny desires for material things while devoting their revolution to taking material things."

13. To what does Beauvoir compare the "sub-man"?
(a) A common laborer.
(b) An unpublished writer.
(c) A bad painter.
(d) A dull book.

14. How does Beauvoir show how her example of moving through obstacles prove her arguments?
(a) She asserted that Van Gogh, despite being institutionalized, integrated his his past as a painter and continued to communicate through his talent.
(b) She pointed out that Hitler had desires to rule the world in spite of the fact that he did not have the ability to take his navy outside of the North Sea.
(c) She explained that Adalai Stevenson believed his intellectualism would over come Dwight Eisenhower's popular reputation in two presidential elections.
(d) She explained that Sisyphus was condemned to rolling the boulder up the mountain despite his the fact that it would roll back down once he got it to the top.

15. What does Beauvoir claim matters to the serious man?
(a) Setting a track to achieve a predetermined goal.
(b) Being able to lose himself in the nature of the object which he prefers to himself.
(c) Subjecting himself to the project that defines his ambiguity to himself.
(d) Using his ambiguity to shape his ethics.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Beauvoir explain that the serious man becomes a dangerous tyrant?

2. How does Beauvoir characterize the response of Western women when the structures that shelter them seem to be in danger?

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

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

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

(see the answer keys)

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