After having read through the portion of the text that we needed to, I kept coming back to this passage. So far, everything that we have read, up to this point, has seemed "hypothetical" and what if. I made mention of it in my last post, but where Cicero stands out is his stance of fact.
In true rhetoric you can't make something up, lest you come off looking like an ass. Like science you have to have fact and that fact has to be some basis of truth that is organized into a semblance of structure that is not only agreed upon but able to be replicated, discussed and articulated.
A true rhetorician can't / won't just jump into rhetoric and expect to be perfect from the get-go. There has to be trial and error, and from what we've seen from Plato and moving forward, there seems to be a grooming period in which a pupil will simply listen to the master. Questioning seems to be a mechanism simply for the master to continue hearing the sound of his own voice. There needs to be a legitimate amount of base knowledge before someone can be considered an experienced rhetorician/
But at a time when little was written down it appeared that there was intense study done in the practice of discourse because it was so important that the next in line, the next pupil, absolutely had to have the facts down, lest important knowledge be lost.
Science is much the same way in that there has to be an intense period of study lest the important facts be lost, and through that period of study there needs to be repeated practicing lest the pupil not be fully aware of the power of the science / rhetoric.
Like science, rhetoric needs to be able to be challenged. There has to be a form of discourse that allows for the expression of dissenting ideas and a way to test those dissenting ideas such that either the tests are repeatable.
What is interesting is that on page 303 Cicero then almost questions himself with the question of "Is there a science of rhetoric?" I am going to interject my own answer to that question and say that YES, there is. It's the structured and formatted way in which we approach both science and rhetoric that allows for the approach that we now use.
Is there a difference between an art and a science? I believe that art needs to be challenged just as much as science, in fact it has been. The nature of the sublime in art comes from this sense of controversy. The nature of finding truth by using facts and evidence in science that you point, could easily be applied to a philosophical truth found in a painting. The components that are taken to study an art could be just as foundational as science, such as music theory. Is that a science or an art? I understand that Cicero is differentiating between the two, but in this time period and how we think of art after post-structuralism, how is it different that science?
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