Stardust and the Human Condition

Stardust, as my dad said, "is the perfect movie. A bit of drama, a lot of action, a good amount of humour, some mystery, some magic and some romance.". It is one of those movies that you can watch over and over and over again without ever getting tired of it. Stardust (surprise, surprise!) is also a very good example of the hero's journey and transformation. It begins with a quote that really gets me thinking though, and this quote is truly the essence of what I am getting at on this blog : "Are we human because we gaze at the stars or do we gaze at the stars because we are human?". In all of the archetypes that I am exploring, I ask the question: is this idea formed by human nature or is it an idea that has just been taken and re-modeled again and again? After watching this movie (again), I realized that perhaps this question, too, is unanswerable because there is too much evidence on both sides. I mean, on one hand, many great writers have had ideas come to them in dreams or spontaneously, but that general idea, whether they know it or not, may have been explored thousands of years prior to their existance. The argument for this is that sometimes humans absorb things without knowing that they are doing so, and therefore an idea in a dream may have come from something present in the world already, being passed down this way throughout time. It almost hurts your head to think about, doesn't it? Anyways, I certainly will continue to explore this idea of the human condition impacting ideas and stories, but perhaps not as narrowmindedly as previous.

What are your thoughts on the question "Are we human because we gaze at the stars or do we gaze at the stars because we are human?"? What makes us human? Is it what we do and how we think, or is it simply a scientific classification based on physical things? Is there a difference between belonging to the homo sapien species and belonging to the human race?