Reading Albrecht Dürer’S the Knight, Death, and the Devil Ab Ovum: Life Understood as a Struggle

By William C. Auden

In Albrecht Drers famous engraving The Knight, Death, and the Devil, a knight, a figure of death, and the Devil represent three significant archetypes of human experience: success, the passing of time, and misfortune. Yet all arouse feareven terrorand herald the inevitable tragedy of the near or distant future. The question is therefore how such an image of tragedy and misfortune can be the basis for a motivational text?
In Reading Albrecht Drers The Knight, Death, and the Devil Ab Ovum: Life Understood as a Struggle, author William C. Auden provides a connection between these figures and the demands and expectations of modern-day society when it comes to being successful. It will help us better understand how the path to individual success requires values that serve both others and society itself. While there will always be pressure to gain success at any cost, a moral approach to personal success can be informed by benevolent social behavior, tolerance, and acceptance.
Although success in business or in life can be a struggle, understanding the ways success, misfortune, and inevitability work together to provide us with motivation can help us find a balance between modern social needs and the social pressure to achieve successfor both ourselves and for our society as a whole.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Aug 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781480828841

William C. Auden

William C. Auden is a thinker and philosopher who has dedicated his time to analyzing the social context of human interactions. Over the last thirty years, Dr. Auden has taught several academic courses, and those opportunities have allowed him to deeply engage in the modern social environment.

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Copyright © 2016 William C. Auden.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Cover image credit: Albrecht Durer

ISBN: 978-1-4808-2883-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-2884-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016913329

Archway Publishing rev. date: 8/26/2016

CONTENTS

Preface

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1 Knight, as the personification of the need of identity

Chapter 2 The success, as an expression of the need of belonging

Chapter 3 The need for acceptance

Epilog

PREFACE

The book character was intended to serve as a teaching material in motivational workshops.

As it was once elegantly formulated by a famous fortune teller: all we need nowadays is money, money and even more money. The book itself represents a short story describing how to achieve that goal with relatively little efforts. This book is about our priorities and the way to achieve all of them.

The best way to accomplish our goals is to follow individually prescribed formula for a one who desires to fulfill his live while utilizing motivational path. Unfortunately, the author is capable only to describe general pattern leading to success. In general, if you are able to follow some particular rules and you feel that you are on the right track to success, your intuition will take you there.

The recent research reviled that only 5% of the US population is able to move vertically in social structure in each generation. That proofs that the pure luck plays enormous role in our operation called the road to success. That is regarding any one individual success. Is there any other success possible besides individual? In the book you can find the answers to tis and other questions related to success in you live. For example, is the ultimate goal of our life to be happy or is it rather something else, something more solid, and at the same time more objective? Does happiness and success go hand by hand or are they rather opposite concepts?

FOREWORD

When Dr. Auden asked me to write a foreword for his short story Life understood as a straggle, and my first reaction was, very well! This isn’t difficult for me! In fact I started to write it the same evening. Soon I wrote a few pages. I was happy and excited because of the impression I was under when I read it first time a few weeks ago.

However, when I have read my text the next day, what stroked me