A human individual is both a member or part of Humanity and a whole embodiment or instance of Humanity. (In logical terms, these are the collective and distributive senses of ‘humanity,’ respectively.) A typical community is a larger part of Humanity than an individual, but is less human, less personal – does not embody Humanity as completely.
A corporation is still less human, though it may be deemed a ‘person’ for legal purposes. Modern corporations are degenerate persons, legal fictions created for a specific and very limited purpose, namely to maximize financial profits while minimizing risk for the shareholders. In order to develop real personalities they would have to learn from their interactions with others, as genuine persons do – interactions based on empathy. But the growth and development of empathy is entirely different from what economists call ‘growth.’
Many myths, legends and comprehensive works of fiction, such as Blake’s prophetic books and Finnegans Wake, portray the cosmos as a reflection or expression of the human bodymind, and the history of humanity as the biography (or the dream) of a universal Human Being. This represents a mythic/artistic blending of the collective and distributive views of Humanity, of human bodymind.
In the mythic dimension of science, the ultimate community of inquiry is more than just humanity: it is the whole system of all living beings, the cast of characters of God’s dream.