In L' tre et le ant (Being and Nothingness), Sartre disputes Heidegger's affirmation that human reality is doomed to death because of its finitude; he establishes that a finite and temporally limitless existence could be conceivable; nevertheless, if human life were not inhabited by death, the relationship of human beings to the world and to themselves would be so deeply upset that the statement 'man is mortal' would be anything but an empirical truth: immortal, an existent would no longer be what we call a man.