This is one of the most important questions in philosophy. We can easily become lost by the minutiae of the subject as Antoine de Saint-Exupà ©ry suggests. We can also be overwhelmed by the broad picture as Goethe and Shakespeare have implied in their quotes.
I have discussed the coming epoch of the majority of human beings in the United States--and eventually the other Western Democracies--being reduced to a condition of virtual involuntary servitude in my February11, 2012 OpEdNews article, " I Am Spartacus! "
"Georg W.F. Hegel described this fact in his Philosophy of Right (p. 42), 'The slave knows not his essence, his infinitude, his freedom; he does not know himself in his essence, and not to know himself is not to think himself. The self-consciousness, which by thought apprehends that itself is essence, and thus puts away from itself the accidental and untrue, constitutes the principle of right, morality, and all forms of ethical observance. They who, in speaking philosophically of right, morality, and ethical observance, would exclude thought and turn to feeling, the heart, the breast, and inspiration, express the deepest contempt for thought and science.' In other words, when a human being has no time to think, only to feel, and to react to base emotion, without consideration of consequences, he has been reduced to the status of slave.
In Rome, and throughout history, a slave has had no intrinsic value. To continue with Hegel's observations on slaves throughout history, 'Thus in Roman law, for instance, no definition of man was possible, because it excluded the slave,' ([Hegel], op. cit., p.22). The slave could be killed, mutilated, tortured, raped, starved, beaten and abused without any legal recourse, because they were property. This was equally true two thousand years later in the Antebellum South."
The devaluation of any member of the human race to the status of a mere "thing," the expunging of the individual human's intrinsic value, is a grave danger to any civilization. Today, we risk the very concept of the Humankind being destroyed by the legal convention of corporate personhood. The exaltation of a "thing"--the corporation--to an equivalent status of personhood, devalues the status of human beings.
Our humanity is defined by our ability to think and experience at both the conscious and unconscious level, and to use our thought to change both ourselves and the World around us for the better, if we can. At the unconscious level, our thoughts will usually express themselves in the form of emotions, intuitions, or sometimes even as opinions when we are presented a fact that is contrary to our belief system. We have an inalienable right to have these thoughts, both conscious and unconscious. We even have the right to have thoughts when they are contrary to fact. This is called ignorance. What we don't have is the right to insist that our opinion as factual, when it is not; nor do we have the right to act upon our thoughts, whether conscious or unconscious, if it causes harm to others. The balancing act between the choices of causing harm to different groups of living, breathing humans is a profound conundrum for us all. A "thing," such as a corporation, is incapable of discerning conscious or unconscious, moral or immoral, right of wrong; let alone understand and fear the consequences of its actions.
The great danger we face in this so-called "post-Industrial" World is to not be given the time to think, whether it is about the political system, or what to make for dinner. In spite of his many faults, Karl Marx was nobly motivated in his writings: he wanted to see a world where human beings had the time to reach their fullest potential: as parents, as spouses, as members of the community around them, as human beings; something they would not be able to do until the drudgery of working in a mind-numbing, back-breaking job everyday was made a secondary factor in their lives.
Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (pp.120-1; 1844), described how under the laissez-faire capitalist system, the acquisition of capital would replace all of those other activities that differentiate actualized, aware human beings from mindless automatons who were biological cogs in the capitalist machine, [Amplifications noted with brackets and my initials]:
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