The message

Waking to the weather I thought I left in Chicago, cold snowy and windy. 

But somewhere the sun is shining and Casey's at the bat, so it's Spring and a new dawn is breaking in my philosophy. A thaw is on the way.

That's due not only to the commencement at last of Spring Training but to something else that followed me home from the Windy City, an eagerness to get on with getting my message out. That'll require more words, and better ones, more tightly stitched. 

It'll require a more poetic touch, in the broad sense of poetry as a kind of evocative word-assisted pointing at something not itself quite verbal. I don't know if I'll get it done, but since Chicago it feels like I've turned an important corner: I've come to believe it's worth really attempting. My esteemed mentor reinforced that newfound confidence over lunch yesterday, as did my meliorist comrade later on zoom.

It's not that I think anyone is breathlessly waiting for my message, any more than William James thought (when he really thought about it) the world needed him to settle its hash. He wrote to his friend Mrs. Whitman, in August 1903,

I find myself eager to get ahead with work which unfortunately won't allow itself to be done in too much of a hurry. I am convinced that the desire to formulate truths is a virulent disease. It has contracted an alliance lately in me with a feverish personal ambition, which I never had before, and which I recognize as an unholy thing in such a connexion. I actually dread to die until I have settled the Universe's hash in one more book, which shall be epoch-machend at last, and a title of honor to my children! Childish idiot—as if formulas about the Universe could ruffle its majesty, and as if the common-sense world and its duties were not eternally the really real!  Letters II 

The common-sense world gets plenty wrong, of course, but my message is that it gets "experience" broadly right. That is, it understands that our conversations in philosophy and everything else of significance are not strictly about only themselves. They're about our lives, about what life is making of itself and will become, about what we take to be real and important and worth trying to communicate and pass along for the benefit of those whose experience is as yet less extensive and hard-won than our own. 

John Dewey was not making an abrupt linguistic turn when he said the things we value most are the residue of the "doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link"; he was talking about experience. He wasn't talking about talking.

So my message, not epoch-making or hash-settling but simply something I think needs (as Goober told Andy) to be brung out, is: we must not casually deride or dismiss experience in philosophy. We must not stop talking about it, but neither should we stop having and valuing and learning from it, and transmitting the best of it as the conveyance of that "heritage of values" we hope may be our most useful legacy. 

“The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.” A Common Faith