Jan Patocka (1907-77), Vaclav Havel and Jiri Hajek were the first spokespersons of Charter 77, which demanded that the communist Czechoslovak government honour its signature on the 1975 Helsinki Human Rights Covenant. Patocka's consequent death after a police interrogation made him a national martyr.

Patocka's phenomenology took a political turn after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion. Phenomenology in a political context raises the spectre of Heidegger's Nazism. Patocka's politics, in sharp contrast, were of dissent and human rights. Clearly, the relation between Patocka's philosophy and politics, theory and praxis is most intriguing.

An Introduction to Husserl's Phenomenology, written in the mid-1960s, demonstrates that had Patocka stopped writing in 1968, he would have been remembered as a competent but not outstanding phenomenologist. Erazim Kohak's translation preserves the elegant style, occasionally at the expense of clarity. It may be useful for basic and intermediate courses in phenomenology, but the teacher will have to balance the Heideggerian bias and provide information on post-1965 developments.

Still, the book suggests why phenomenology became a founding philosophy of dissidence. Phenomenology pulls the rug from under a host of doctrines that were associated with communism: materialism; the objectivisation of the person; the reduction of the person to a means of production, homo faber; and the technological manipulation of "human resources". Phenomenology appeared to be a radical method of inquiry that constituted a revolt of authentic individuals against an alienating system.

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Patocka's 1975 essays on the philosophy of history are heretical because they deny the dominant progressive models of history. Czech history provides the background, if not the explanation, for Patocka's devolutionary concept of history. Czechoslovak democracy was uprooted three times in 50 years, in 1938-39, 1948 and 1968. Abandoned, the leadership lacked the courage to order its army to fight, and capitulated.

Western history and its philosophy are written often from the perspective of the protestant liberal-democratic victors. The vanquished liberal democrats offer an alternative perspective. In Was sind die Tschechen? (What are the Czechs?), Patocka attempted to find out where Czech history went wrong. In his Heretical Essays he attempts to understand the Czech predicament within its European context.

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Patocka interpreted the history of modern Europe as an interplay between everyday production and orgiastic eruptions of irresponsibility in wars and revolutions. Following Heidegger, Patocka perceived "everydayness", work and survival, as alienating and inauthentic; and the other side of everydayness, escapism, as an irresponsible stepping out of the self.

For Patocka, history proper was the process of overcoming the cycle of inauthentic everydayness and escapism through discovery of the authentic self in self-conscious inquiry, which he termed care for the soul. Following Hannah Arendt, such history began in the Greek polis where the public sphere allowed free argumentation and inquiry, the practice of care for the soul. History began with a search for meaning that made the recording of that search a worthy activity.

Patocka perceived Plato as the founder of Europe because Platonism turns the soul away from the orgiastic through discipline and responsibility to transcendent ideas. Patocka understood Christianity like Nietzsche as Platonism for the people.

In Patocka's interpretation, the ideal of sacrum imperium, the just state dedicated to care for the soul, survived in the Holy Roman Empire. Charles IV ruled from his capital in Prague over what Patocka interpreted as a spiritually united European empire. In Europe, in contrast to the Byzantine or Muslim empires, the religious authority maintained its autonomy and continued the Platonic tradition of care for the soul.

The significance of separation of church from state is recognised also in his theories of civic society. But Patocka over-idealised the European Middle Ages. "Unified Christianity" had its share of divisions and wars; and the kind of free argumentation that Patocka idealised in the Greek polis was not quite the norm.

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Like other anti-modernists, Patocka understood the crisis of modernity as the destruction of Christian-Platonic ontology by modern scientific rationality that objectivised nature by emptying it of meaning and values. Patocka bemoaned the replacement of European universalism by spiritual particularism during the German enlightenment. The nationalist division of Europe, bent on scientism and energy production and storage, led to two world wars and the self-destruction of Europe.

Patocka's anti-communism was an aspect of general anti-modernism. Technology, despite its contribution to the reduction of drudgery, has not solved the main problem of humanity: how to live in an authentically human way? Patocka's conclusion is that there is no solution to the problem of the meaning of history because nobody cares for it any more.

Patocka's anti-modernism is not very original. His "boredom theory of war" is unconvincing. Modernisation theory, for example, connects economic prosperity and consumerism with democratisation and pacification. Understanding how and why Patocka's dissidence differs from the politics of other anti-modernists is more interesting.

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Political liberty is necessary for practising care for the soul. Hence, a struggle for human rights is for authenticity. Unlike Heidegger, Patocka thought he discovered how to transcend alienating everydayness: sacrifice recognises implicitly that there is something beyond everydayness that is more important than life. Patocka drew on Ernst Junger and Teilhard de Chardin's accounts of the experience of soldiers in the trenches of the first world war to understand how sacrifice shatters everydayness. The shared experience of sacrifice creates solidarity of the shaken across the trenches.

Solidarity apart, German and French soldiers continued to fight each other. War veterans form often the confused electorate of ideological pied-pipers. But Patocka's own communities of the shaken were of dissidents who sacrificed everydayness, assumed responsibility and gained solidarity through confrontation with the totalitarian state. Patocka hoped that the danger of nuclear war would shake humanity into forging such solidarity.

Dissidence was Patocka's self-sacrifice for authenticity, just as arguing in the marketplace was Socrates's care for his soul. Havel described in his obituary of Patocka their last dialogue in a prison waiting-room between interrogations. As in Plato's story of the death of Socrates in Phaedo, Patocka spent his last hours with Havel discussing the immortality of the soul.

Aviezer Tucker works at the Czech Academy of Science and teaches at Palacky University.

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