 Lipiner was born in Jarosław.A prodigious talent, he produced a well-regarded treatment of 'Prometheus Unbound' at the age of seventeen, He attended the University of Leipzig as a student of philosophy, literature and natural science; one of his teachers was Gustav Fechner.By his early twenties, he had produced an important work on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and become a personal acquaintance of Nietzsche — who had called him 'a veritable genius'.