(4) The latter kind of subordination is called
subalternation. An instance of this is the way the science of optics is subordinated to geometry.
Two generic, or truth-fluctuating, propositions, now true, now false, seem to us compatible with one of the following relationships: interference (the weakest conditioning, neither necessary nor sufficient);
subalternation (the sufficiently-necessary conditioning); superalternation (the necessarily-sufficient conditioning); equivalence (the necessary and sufficient conditioning); nonrelationality (the weakest opposition, neither contrary nor subcontrary); contrariety (the contrarily-contrary opposition); subcontrariety (the subcontrarily-subcontrary opposition); contradiction (the contrary and subcontrary opposition).
Although he explains that metaphysics considers being per se whereas the other sciences consider only parts of it, this does not mean that the relationship is one of subordination or
subalternation. Three criteria need to be fulfilled as a precondition for such a relationship: first, the subaltern science has to add something to the subject of the subalternating science; secondly, this addition cannot belong to the genus of the subject of the subalternating science; thirdly, demonstration must proceed from the subalternating to the subaltern science.
On the
subalternation of natural philosophy and medicine to theology, see Ed Grant, The Nature of Natural Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 2010).
If Luvah is clearly Urizen's contrary, it would be worth considering the extent to which
subalternation and contradiction, two other relations set out on the square, might inform Urizen's attitude and behavior toward these other two zoas.
Throughout its history, Black scholars have been producing a body of knowledge that is contributive to the intellectual and political liberation of African-Americans fighting
subalternation by the existing social order.
(Incidentally, the point of analogy as discussed in HWCC was not to suggest that the influence of faith on all the disciplines should ever be extrinsic rather than intrinsic - a danger in much of the modem teaching on analogy and the "
subalternation" of disciplines -, but to sustain the respect required by faith itself for the creaturely difference on all levels.)
Consider this typical passage: "The theory called
subalternation located the continuity of scientific character, the bearer of scientificite, on a subjective rather than an objective plane.