Straight from the (now) Pope's mouth

Pure objectivity is an absurd abstraction. It is not the uninvolved who comes to knowledge; rather, interest itself is a requirement for the possibility of coming to know.

Here, then, is the question: how does one come to be interested, not so that the self drowns out the voice of the other, but in such a way that one develops a kind of inner understanding for things of the past, and ears to listen to the word they speak to us today?

from "Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: The 1988 Erasmus Lecture"
By Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI