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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How does Beauvoir define nihilism?
(a) Nihilism is disappointed seriousness which has been turned back upon itself.
(b) Nihilism is the recognition of the sub-man that he has no purpose outside of what has been defined for him.
(c) Nihilism is the point of nothingness that is felt at the point that the serious man reaches his goals.
(d) Nihilism is the point at which existentialists realize that reality is not framed by their thoughts.

2. What does Descartes credit man's unhappiness to, according to Beauvoir?
(a) His inability to accept his ambiguity.
(b) The inner conflict between doing right and doing what he wants.
(c) Having first been a child.
(d) His lack of freedom.

3. 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, "...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.
(c) Beauvoir asserts, "Despite their disparate views, existentialists easily welcome any detractor because they only see them as creations of their own minds."
(d) 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."

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

5. How does Beauvoir bring into question the Marxist claim that pure proletariat revolution is generated by the proletariat class?
(a) The Proletariat can be influenced by materialistic gain.
(b) A proletariat revolution is too often halted by various conditions in various locations.
(c) Too often members of the proletariat seek to become bourgeois.
(d) That even a Marxist needs to make a personal decision to join one party or another.

6. How does Beauvoir characterize the response of Western women when the structures that shelter them seem to be in danger?
(a) They become harder, more bitter and even more furious or cruel than their masters.
(b) They become detached and unemotional.
(c) They become confused and bewildered to the point of despair.
(d) They drive themselves further into the subjection that makes them child like.

7. What is the paradox with which Beauvoir closes Chapter One?
(a) In order to fill his existence, man must assume himself as a being who, "makes himself a lack of being so that there might be being."
(b) Man is a being that, "in order to know the existence of achievement he must face the nothingness of failure."
(c) Man as an individual is, "At once alone in himself which makes up the mass of universality."
(d) "Man cannot know existence without first knowing his nothingness."

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

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

10. How does Beauvoir explain how goals supplant freedom in the life of the serious man?
(a) Rather than finding freedom in choosing goals, the serious man chooses goals to avoid his freedom.
(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) Goals become the means of defining the existence of the serious man at the cost of freedom and individually defining his ethics.

11. 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) Sartre's man eliminates the needs for external moral influence by following passions that eventually lead to personal benefit.
(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.

12. How does Beauvoir suggest a child has a state of security?
(a) By virtue of his hopes for the future.
(b) By virtue of the fantasy world he creates in his mind.
(c) By virtue of the adults who control his life.
(d) By virtue of his very insignificance.

13. 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 understands the finite nature of life.
(c) In the nihilist attitude one experiences the ambiguity of the human condition.
(d) The nihilist attitude is prepared for obstacles that always come from a complex world.

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

15. 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) "I call any action useful to the party moral action; I call it immoral if it is harmful to the party."
(d) "The entire purpose of training, educating and teaching the youth of today should be to imbue them with communist ethics."

Short Answer Questions

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

2. What is the point at which existentialism is opposed to dialectic materialism according to Beauvoir?

3. Beauvoir claims that critics of existentialism claim that it is solipsistic. What is solipsism?

4. How does Beauvoir explain that Marxists perceive that acts can be regarded as good or bad?

5. How does Beauvoir suggest a past accomplishment can be made relevant in the present?

(see the answer keys)

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