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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Beauvoir report to the the qualities of God that establishes moral standards?
(a) A moral code from God contributes to establishing a moral consensus that directs thought.
(b) A moral code from God constricts believers to live within boundaries.
(c) A moral code given from God removes the demands from human minds to create one.
(d) A God can pardon, efface and compensate.

2. What does Beauvoir claim to be the choice that comes to a young man after a long crisis?
(a) He can escape the stress of his existence or throw himself into the object that defines his goal.
(b) He can accept his ambiguity and move to freedom and ethics, or he can return to the shelters of his childhood.
(c) He can define his life through his choices, or avoid his choices and slip into nothingness.
(d) He either turns back toward the world of his parents and teachers or he adheres to the values which are new but seem to him just as sure.

3. How does Beauvoir compare Marxism to existentialism?
(a) Marxism rejects the idea of authority in the development of organized masses.
(b) Marxism establishes moral thought through mass rejection of the moral order.
(c) Marxism rejects the moral foundations of law that are rooted in the protection of public property.
(d) Marxism rejects the idea of inhuman objectivity and locates itself in the tradition of Kant and Hegel.

4. Although Beauvoir reports that existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity, what does she claim to be existentialism's fundamental flaw?
(a) It is so deeply ambiguous that its true understanding cannot be achieved.
(b) Existentialism is essentially taken by individuals seeking to pursue what is normally antisocial and contributes to the violence of mastery of nature.
(c) Its true ambiguity is superficial since it has no moral code.
(d) It is incapable of furnishing any principle for making choices.

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

Short Answer Questions

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

2. How does Beauvoir consider stubbornness in the face of an obstacle that is impossible to overcome?

3. What type of man does Beauvoir identify as being nihilistic?

4. How does human spontaneity give purpose to a human life, according to Beauvoir?

5. How does Beauvoir claim that a spontaneous action, or flight, can be converted into will?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Beauvoir describe the difference between Marxists and existentialist?

2. How does Beauvoir characterize Materialists?

3. How does Beauvoir show that the "sub-man" passes into being a serious man?

4. What does Beauvoir point out as the difference between the passionate man and the adventurer?

5. How does Beauvoir relate nature of man's existence to the past, present, and future in Part I?

6. According to Beauvoir, how does man cast himself into the world?

7. How does Beauvoir claim that man can find truth in his life?

8. Upon what basis does Beauvoir suggest that a man decides upon what he wants to be?

9. How does Beauvoir explain that willing bad is possible?

10. To what does Beauvoir credit the development of many different philosophical world views?

(see the answer keys)

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