Abstract

From a biographical description made by the German thinker Martin Heidegger of the Spanish thinker José Ortega y Gasset, this article sets out to explore how Heideggerian philosophy requires a tragic condition for its development and promotion. The first part of the article attempts to justify why Heidegger’s thinking would fit harmoniously within Ortega’s description of Spanish culture and his vision of death. The notion of death is approached as a cultural and philosophical problem of great relevance in order to understand the being-in-the-world of a specific society or nation. In our case, we try to show that Ortega’s description of Spain as a philosophical and cultural problem at least coincides with the phenomenological-existential description that Heidegger develops in Being and Time. In its second part, through Heidegger’s dialogue with Hölderlin, an attempt is made to show how this tragic need for philosophising continues in Heidegger’s work. Finally, it concludes by leaving the reader with a question: was Heidegger a Southern-Spanish thinker?