It should already be becoming clear that Heidegger conceives of the human way of being as essentially conditioned. The Western philosophical tradition has often presupposed that the human subject can in some way transcend the material realm upon which it fixes its gaze, and so that human beings are only contingently possessed of a world; but, for Heidegger, no sense attaches to the idea of a human being existing apart from or outside a world. This does not, however, mean that human beings are somehow imprisoned in the world, forcibly subjected to the essentially alien limits of embodiment and practical interaction with nature; for those limits are not essentially alien. If no recognizably human existence is conceivable in the absence of a world, then the fact that human existence is worldly cannot be a limitation or constraint upon it; just as someone can only be imprisoned if there is a world outside her prison from which she is excluded, so a set of limits can only be thought of as limitations if there exists a possible mode of existence to which those

limits do not apply. Since that is not the case here, the inherent worldliness of human existence must be thought of as an aspect of the human condition. It is a condition of human life, not a constraint upon it.