In recognizing Reiner Schurmann's legacy, I wish to reconsider the impact of his work. My ultimate aim, however, is to employ his insights as a springboard for new thought-experiments.1 In his monumental essay On Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, Schurmann appropriates Heidegger's thought by showing its implications for deconstructing practical philosophy.2 As suggested in his title, Schurmann advocates an anarchy which can implement alternative modes of governance in place of metaphysical paradigms of presence and order. In the process, he forges a new concept of agency, which relinquishes all voluntaristic ties in favor of the freedom we appropriate in heeding the historical disclosure of being. In formulating the question of agency, does Schurmann overcome the dichotomy between theory and practice which pervades traditional metaphysics? I will argue that while he succeeds in detaching thought from its opposition to action, Schurmann never shows how freedom can supercede all other issues to become the germ of philosophy itself. In effect, he assumes that freedom can be appropriated in ways suggesting contrary forms of guidance: 1) as preserving the claim of tradition through a retrieval of its nascent possibilities for thought, and 2) as implementing quantum changes in any dominant form of political organization even to the point of its reversal.3 Can the succession of new political forms create a climate for thinking that honors tradition above all else? Can a thought which cherishes its Greek origins be reconciled with a more ambitious plan to revolutionize political institutions at the threshold of a new millenium? While Schurmann may not raise these questions beforehand, he certainly tries to answer them. Indeed, he reasserts the Marxist need to change the but refuses to accept the corollary implication of thought's impotence.4 In the same breath, he thrusts the concern for praxis into the forefront of hermeneutic phenomenology in order to separate it from any anti-modem, reactionary tendencies (e.g., fascism).5 To relocate Heidegger's philosophy in its proper topos, he then inverts the priority of a deconstructive strategy carried out exclusively in thought in favor of a second strategy played out in praxis. A critique of the deficiencies and omissions in Western political experience would then stimulate the constellation of a new set of motifs or categories. Such a re-orientation of thought would enable us to respond to the process of being's unconcealment/concealment in ways appropriate to the crises of our contemporary setting. But does the question of being allow for a dramatic shifting of its topography in a way that provides an inroad for future thinkers? In addressing this concern, I will: ) mark the interface between the above deconstructive strategies, 2) specify the manifold senses of freedom that Schurmann combines in his concept of anarchy, and 3) identify what Schurmann never does, namely, a specific exercise of freedom that serves as a precondition not only for our membership in the polls, but also emerges as a guideline to recover the unspoken element in the philosophical tradition. The Crossing of Thought and Action Heidegger refers to the work of art as the opening of a world, as the setting forth of truth. If we can attribute a disclosive dimension to Schurmann's work, we must consider the primeval gestures that mark the thinker's inhabitation of a world and his place within tradition. Schurmann's adherence to tradition emerges in the figure to whom he dedicates his work, specifically, Hannah Arendt. Arendt not only provides a bridge between Heidegger's inquiry and Schurmann's, but also points to the temporal-historical movement that distributes new possibilities for thought. Schurmann cultivates these possibilities in order to retrieve a hidden dimension of Heidegger's phenomenology. Accordingly, his allusion to Arendt is far from coincidental. …