The aim of the text is to highlight the way in which Georges Canguilhem, in his first work, The Normal and the Pathological, builds on the research results of the German neurologist Kurt Goldstein in order to philosophically grasp the phenomenon of life. In fact, by emphasizing this line of thought, it is possible to see that Canguilhem's reflections on life clearly escape the categorization that his disciple Michel Foucault tries to apply to them in his article entitled "Life: experience and science".