Are We Gods, or Are We Beasts?

Walt whitman celebrated his multitudes, and shakespeare celebrated the infinite variety of his inexhaustible personages. But there is an undercurrent of uncertainty, of anxiety running beneath these celebrations. What exactly are we celebrating when we celebrate our human nature? A man says hamlet, and depending on the actor uttering those lines, we are either privy to a compliment or an insult. The elizabethan paradime of the world was that man was a creature of indeterminate place in the world. Every other animal has its place, but where is our place? It's no gift to be ordained with determining one's own limits in the World. Are we gods, or