ABSTRACT
Western philosophy has paid little attention to the theater, perhaps ever since Plato condemned it. People have to wait until Nietzsche for the question of the relationship between theater and philosophy to be raised again with acuity in Western philosophy. Western philosophy's discrediting of the theater is related to a way of approaching the question of the gaze. Since Plato and even more so since Descartes, one of the most interesting philosophical questions is about what it means to look at something, or rather what it means to know if what they are looking at is true or illusory, whether their world is real or deceptive. The very purpose of philosophy is to separate reality from illusion, truth from deception. Accepting the non-difference between truth and falsehood, between reality and illusion, is the very condition of the existence of theater.
