The Prospects for Communist China

An ancient tradition holds that Pythagoras discovered the secrets of harmony within aforge when he came across five men hammering with five hammers, producing a wondrous sound. Four ofthe five hammers stood in a marvelous set of proportions, harmonizing; but there was also a fifthhammer. Pythagoras saw and heard it, but he could not measure it; nor could he understand itsdiscordant sound. Pythagoras therefore discarded it. What was this hammer, such that Pythagoraschose so decidedly to reject it?Since antiquity, "harmony" has been a name for more than atheory of musical sounds; it has offered a paradigm for the scientific understanding of the naturalworld. Nature, through harmony, has been transcribed in the ideal signs of mathematics. But, timeand again, the transcription has run up against one fundamental limit: something in nature resistsbeing written down, transcribed in a stable set of ideal elements. A fifth hammer, obstinately,continues to sound. In eight chapters, linked together as are the tones of a single scale, The FifthHammer explores the sounds and echoes of that troubling percussion as they make themselves felt onthe most varied of attempts to understand and represent the natural world. From music tometaphysics, aesthetics to astronomy, and from Plato and Boethius to Kepler, Leibniz, and Kant, thisbook explores the ways in which the ordering of the sensible world has continued to suggest areality that no notes or letters can fully transcribe.

Daniel Heller-Roazen is Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature and the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. He is the author of Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation, and The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations, all published by Zone Books.