La edad de la razón
Emmanuelle“La edad de la razón” is presented not as an achieved historical period but as a difficult future threshold that humanity may have to bring into existence through conscious action. In Mario’s account, eroticism becomes a moral and civilizational practice: a means of enlarging human intelligence, pursuing happiness, and helping the species move beyond fear, religious tutelage, and the complacent belief that it has already found the truth it seeks.
Definition and Historical Horizon
Mario begins from the limited but decisive claim that human beings can try to increase their intelligence and do everything possible to become happy. Happiness is not guaranteed, nor is there any promise of reaching the remote shore that Mario can name only by that word. Yet he invokes Eluard’s proposition that a world does not require everything, but requires happiness and nothing more. The formulation gives happiness a structural importance: it is not an ornament added to life but the condition that makes a world worth creating.
The passage places this aspiration within a long history of human emancipation. Since childhood, Mario argues, the human animal has needed courage to move away from the guardianship of its gods. The same courage remains necessary in the present, when people must risk the unguaranteed life of the street rather than wait passively for a promised kingdom in which the meek and tender-hearted will be rewarded. The Age of Reason therefore emerges as a wager against both religious submission and solitary contemplation; it requires participation in uncertain life, with the possibility of death and error attached to freedom.
Erotic Practice as a Way of Life
Mario’s decisive proposal is that people should act as masters of life, behaving as if they were truly living rather than waiting for permission or certainty. In place of holy water, he identifies the practice of eroticism as a source of illumination. Eroticism is thus elevated beyond private appetite. It becomes a discipline capable of organizing conduct, perception, and collective values.
The proposed transformation depends on numbers as well as conviction. Mario imagines that, if a sufficiently large number of people adopted the erotic scale of values without reservation, with clarity and vehemence, that scale could become the sole moral scale. He compares the change to a quadruped that decided once and for all to stand on its hind legs, without troubling over whether the rest of animal life preferred to remain crawling in the mud. The image presents the movement toward reason as evolutionary in form but voluntary in execution: humanity must make the leap before it can know whether the leap will succeed.
From Fear to Reason
Mario distinguishes the desired future from the present by naming the latter the Age of Fear. The transition is described as a decisive step, the necessary and sufficient path by which the species might pass from fear into reason. Yet his language remains conditional. The laws of evolution are still largely mysterious, and he suggests that humanity may not even have been born in the fullest sense. To be born would mean taking responsibility for life rather than merely existing within inherited forms.
This makes the Age of Reason less a settled doctrine than a project under permanent uncertainty. Mario admits that it would have been preferable to be born a million years later, when the transformation might already have occurred. Since that future is unavailable, the present must bring it closer. The historical distance between fear and reason is therefore measured not only in time but in conduct: every gesture and every word can either advance the step or delay it.
Words, Bodies, and Moral Responsibility
Mario assigns himself a specific duty within this unfinished transition. He must repeat without respite that human bodies are just, that human powers are infinite, and that the sweetness of living is also life’s reason for being. These repeated affirmations oppose the conviction that humanity has already discovered what it came to seek. They also make the body a site of knowledge and ethical value rather than an object governed solely by prohibition, shame, or religious authority.
The program is consequently exacting rather than permissive in a simple sense. Mario insists that words and even the smallest gestures must be watched, because careless expression can confirm people in the foolish belief that they have already arrived. The erotic ethic demands vigilance over language as well as action. Its aim is to prevent humanity’s delayed puberty from becoming permanent and to prepare the conditions for a collective maturity that remains, at the close of the passage, unrealized.
Significance in the Narrative
“La edad de la razón” gives Mario’s erotic philosophy its broadest historical ambition. His teaching to Emmanuelle connects personal happiness with a theory of species-wide transformation, turning erotic experience into an argument about freedom, evolution, and the future of civilization. At the same time, the passage retains the risk of self-deception: Emmanuelle warns that courage can become the courage to be mistaken, to form illusions about human nature, and to overestimate one’s powers and importance.
That tension prevents the expression from functioning as a straightforward promise of progress. The Age of Reason is sustained by hope, but it is shadowed by uncertainty about whether people understand themselves correctly and whether their proposed liberation merely replaces one authority with another. Its significance lies in this unresolved wager: happiness must be pursued, erotic values must be practiced collectively, and humanity must act before it can know whether it has truly learned how to live.
