Age of Reason

The Age of Reason is the future condition imagined by Mario as the decisive transformation of humanity. It names the passage from an age governed by fear, religious myth, and servitude to one in which people act as masters of life, cultivate intelligence, and treat happiness as the sufficient purpose of a world. Its immediate instrument is not political revolution but eroticism understood as a rational moral discipline, an education of the body and character, and a possible biological mutation in human consciousness.

Definition and Historical Horizon

Mario presents the Age of Reason as the opposite of the Age of Fear. He does not describe it as a newly designed state or a social program that could simply be imposed through institutions. Instead, he imagines a future moment when the human brain will change abruptly: people will think differently, become different beings, and no longer understand the ignorance, terror, and bondage that shaped their earlier race. The transformation is therefore both historical and biological, a leap in human development rather than an ordinary reform.

The distance between the present and this future remains immense. Mario admits that it would have been preferable to be born a million years later, into the world he anticipates. Yet that distance does not justify passivity. He argues that the present generation must do everything possible to draw the future nearer, treating the transition itself as a duty. The Age of Reason consequently functions as a horizon that judges present conduct: words, gestures, and choices matter according to whether they hasten or delay the “step.”

Erotic Reason and Happiness

Mario’s route toward the Age of Reason is the practice of eroticism as a rule of life. He describes eroticism not as a collection of social amusements but as a conception of human destiny: a measure, canon, code, ceremony, art, school, and science. Its laws rest on reason rather than credulity, trust rather than fear, and love of life rather than a mysticism of death. In this framework, sexual experience is recast as a form of knowledge and self-formation.

He also insists that eroticism represents progress rather than decadence. By desacralizing sex, it becomes, in his account, an instrument of mental and social health and a means of spiritual promotion. It educates character by replacing the passions of illusion with the passions of lucidity. The Age of Reason therefore does not merely permit pleasure; it gives pleasure a philosophical and moral function, making bodily freedom part of a larger project of human intelligence.

Happiness is the central measure of this project. Mario invokes the principle that a world does not require everything in existence but requires happiness, and nothing else. Reaching that happiness nevertheless demands courage: humanity must leave the protection of its gods, abandon solitary expectation of supernatural reward, and accept the risks of ordinary life, including the risk of error. In the future morality he imagines, good is what produces pleasure, while evil is what produces pain, ugliness, boredom, limitation, and frustration. The standard is deliberately immediate and embodied, opposed to anxiety, mystical ecstasy, and the inherited need for hallucinogens, philosophers, or hermits to cure despair.

The Human Being as a Work of Art

The Age of Reason also depends on a radical conception of art. Mario argues that humanity once separated itself from the animal through art, but that painting, sculpture, color, line, and sound can no longer satisfy the creative passion of modern human beings. The next art must take living bodies and minds as its material. Eroticism becomes the art capable of carrying humanity beyond its existing limits.

His formulation is deliberately unsettling: the erotic artist does not simply admire, love, or enjoy the natural body, but takes hold of it in order to challenge and reshape its inherited form and substance. To reconstruct the human being is, for Mario, to rescue the person from blind cellular material and free that person to establish self-chosen laws. This ambition makes the Age of Reason more than an ethical improvement. It is a project of remaking humanity itself, with erotic practice serving as the medium through which matter is transformed into a freer spiritual existence.

Collective Mutation and the Murias

Mario distinguishes individual progress from the larger transformation he hopes will affect the whole human species. Emmanuelle points out that a change practiced by one person has only individual consequences, whereas Mario has spoken of progress as though it belonged to everyone. His answer is collective: once a sufficiently large number of people adopt erotic values without reservation, clarity, and fervor as their only moral scale, humanity may take the decisive evolutionary step.

The example of the Murias gives this speculation a concrete social form. Quentin has spent several months in India with the sociologist Verrier Elwin among a people whom “civilized” Indians call primitive but whom Mario interprets as an advance of intelligence. Their society is organized around a sexual morality opposite to that of the surrounding civilization. Rather than prohibiting sexuality, it forms and educates it through Gothul, a communal dormitory where boys and girls are admitted from early childhood to learn the art of love.

Mario treats the Murias as evidence that the Age of Reason may already exist in embryonic form and may have existed for a thousand years. Their system is said to prevent jealousy and to produce adults with an exceptional sexual knowledge, people to whom the shadows, complaints, and despairs of Mario’s civilization are foreign. Emmanuelle objects that such a morality must be an inborn grace rather than something acquired through effort. Mario rejects that conclusion: poetry, genius, harmony, and erotic capacity are not gifts delivered fully formed by nature. They must be learned. His maxim is that learning is learning to enjoy, and the Murias demonstrate not a chosen biological essence but the possibility of reaching the desired age earlier.

Thresholds, Contradictions, and Narrative Meaning

The Age of Reason remains a promise rather than a settled destination. Mario claims that humanity may have to bring itself into the world, acting as though it were already living rather than waiting for an external revelation. At the same time, he concedes that the laws of evolution remain largely mysterious and that the projected mutation may never occur. The concept therefore combines confidence in rational self-creation with an admission of uncertainty about nature and history.

The narrative repeatedly places Emmanuelle at thresholds where familiar rules become unstable. On the flight from London to Bangkok, the aircraft becomes a closed universe with different and more demanding laws, replacing ordinary freedom with the leisure and security of submission. At the bathhouse, Ariane leads her through unfamiliar corridors and separates her into a private cabin. Later, guided by Mario and followed by Quentin, she crosses a narrow plank over stagnant canal water, climbs a ruined wall, and enters a space where the ordinary relation between clothing, spectatorship, shame, and sexual conduct is suspended. These passages give the Age of Reason a physical counterpart: it is approached through crossings, initiations, and confrontations with rules that differ from those of conventional society.

Yet the scenes also expose tensions within Mario’s ideal. His language of freedom and self-created law coexists with authority, instruction, public observation, and pressure. Emmanuelle’s body becomes the ground on which philosophical claims are tested, while her hesitation and embarrassment reveal that inherited fear does not disappear simply because a new moral vocabulary declares it obsolete. The Age of Reason is thus both an emancipatory promise and a demanding discipline, requiring people to retrain their responses as thoroughly as they are asked to revise their beliefs.

Its decisive significance lies in this fusion of historical prophecy and bodily practice. Mario does not wait for reason to arrive as an abstract enlightenment; he demands conduct that might produce it. The future age is measured by whether human beings can abandon fear, learn pleasure, accept happiness as a serious moral end, and become responsible for making themselves. It remains remote, possibly a million years away, but the novel gives it urgency by treating every word, gesture, and erotic choice as either preparation for the coming transformation or resistance to it.