It has been characterized as a critical (largely negative) evaluation of the concept of world disclosure in modern philosophy.

[6] This freedom from all forms of external authority, which includes nature as well as tradition, means that the subject “has to create its normativity out of itself;”[7] because it is free, it cannot accept any value or law that it does not recognize as its own.

Subjectivity, in other words, is defined by “the right to criticism: the principle of the modern world requires that what anyone is to recognize shall reveal itself to him as something entitled to recognition.

What appears, then, in Nietzsche as the historical “other” reason is in fact a version of Kantian aesthetics shorn of any claim of intersubjective validity.

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is regarded as an important contribution to Frankfurt School critical theory.