One of the most powerful notes of Quevedo is not to be a precursor of existentialism, but to be existentialism itself.
Quevedo, not Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, or Sartre, is the architect of existentialism, based on a specifically Spanish transformation of Stoicism and Christianity.
To consider that the center of gravity of existentialism lies in Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, or Sartre is to ignore that these writers or philosophers—or sophists, or whatever they may be called—are nothing but out-of-date existentialists. And eccentric ones.
The Contemporary Age, guided by Anglo-Saxon and German idealist thought, erratically seeks, even mystically, answers to questions that had already been very rationally explained and solved in the Spanish Golden Ages.
If Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and many other contemporary sophists asked these questions again, more than 200 or 300 years late, it is mainly due to their complete ignorance of Spanish Baroque and the literary and philosophical thought of those centuries.
The brutal ignorance of Golden Age thought is a bill that the Anglosphere has paid dearly, and that the contemporary and postmodern world continues to crudely drag because it continues to invisibilize, today more than ever, that arsenal of Spanish Baroque thought and rationalism. Seeking the originality of existentialism in Heidegger's Dasein—or in his pathetic and childish idea of time—is to declare the absolute ignorance regarding the literary work of Francisco de Quevedo.
Heidegger is not to blame; the accommodating and academic ignorance of the interpreters of this Nazi philosopher is to blame. The same goes for the rest of the aforementioned philosophers, particularly the unhealthy Kierkegaard, a man who "thinks" about reality from the suppression of reality, that is, as possessed by a schizotypal personality disorder, where any magical thought reigns supreme.
It is admirable how one can interpret reality with one's back turned to reality. Here is the secret of German idealism. And to not be aware of it. And still dare to celebrate it with the epiphoneme of sapere aude! (In Latin, moreover, in the original Kantian from 1784, What is Enlightenment?).
What kind of understanding can one use when reality has been lost sight of? Contemporary philosophy, in a misguided and mistaken way, seeks answers that are already provided in the classical thought of the Hispano-Greco-Latin literary tradition. And it doesn't even know it.
Jesús G. Maestro