According to Aristotle and Descartes, animals cannot experience pain because they lack rational souls. Vegetation, being on the lowest rung of the hierarchy, as constructed in antiquity and maintained thereafter, is not endowed with reason or emotion. Its "soul," being the most primitive cannot suffer. An exemplum is the cork tree. Even when its skin is removed and its flesh exposed to the elements, it cannot think and it does not have sensation. Such is its fate. But man can impose his notions on that tree and imagine it to possess sensation or see it as an exemplum of the human or animal condition.
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