  The concern about “images” in relation to distance and dialogue surfaced again in Buber’s last major work, The Eclipse of God (1952). The so-called “eclipse of God” was Buber’s symbol for the spiritual crisis in postwar Western civilization. It designated a philosophical collapse as much as a moral one. Like Sartre and Heidegger, Buber directed his attention to concrete existence. But unlike his fellow “existentialists,” Buber was moved by the interaction between humans, individually and collectively, and an absolute reality that exceeds the human imagination. Against Sartre, Heidegger, and also Carl Jung, Buber rejected the picture of self-enclosed human subjects and self-enclosed human life-worlds beyond which there are no external, independent realities. Towards the end of his career as a writer and thinker, Buber sought to maintain the distinction and relation between the human subject and an external other in order to sustain an ontological source of ethical value in opposition to the false absolutes of a modern world that had fused the absolute with the political and historical products of the human spirit.