Volume 50, 2008
Social and Political Philosophy
Thummapudi Bharathi
Pages 27-35
Dr. Ambedkar’s Philosophy
A Step towards Total Humanism
The one great quality of Socratic gift is that thinking as an activity continues but not repetitively but every time thinking takes place, it takes place a new. Thinking is the one activity that cannot be repeated like prayers and other pieties. All philosophical thinking is new thinking; it has to be new in order to be thinking. Philosophy had to become the handmaid of sociology and could not be allowed to remain surrogate sociology. When this happened new concepts or new conceptualizations became the need of the hour: in the place of the age-old hierarchic social stratification a novel concept of materialism had to be inducted - after all matter is what matters. And in India morally entangled sociology was holding down the rich human resources of the sub-continent and a development-oriented ideology had to convert this moral society into a legal society: An unlegislated, unlegislatable society is condemned to be unstable and
collapsible; in its place a stable, legislatable society had to be created. With this felt-need Dr. Ambedkar came into the Indian political arena and gave a modernist rethinking to the outmoded Indian social structure: His hallmark was think to change.